Blogging turns 10 – Happy Birthday to Us!

“Check this out. Amazing!”

Four simple words. Yet they sparked what snowballed into a revolution of sorts on the web.

Those were the very first words to be written on the first blog.

Blogging turned 10 on 1 April 2007.

Created by the US web guru Dave Winer, Scripting News is regarded as the first modern blog, though the term “weblog” was not used in the early days.

Having first gone online on 1 April 1997, Scripting News is still going strong and is credited with helping popularise RSS and podcasting, too.

Winer himself actually calls info.cern.ch, built by Tim Berners-Lee, the first weblog because it “pointed to all the new sites as they came online”.

According to his blog (what else?), Winer, 51, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. He is a former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, my own favourite guide to the often bewildering but fascinating digital world.

Latest figures indicate an estimated 70 million blogs in existence, with around 1.5m posts being written every day.

According to Technorati, which monitors and aggregates blogs, some 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day – that’s about 1.4 blogs every second.

Oh, and what did Dave Winer want checked out? It was just a list of websites he had visited that day.

Read The Guardian (UK) article on 10 years of blogging.

Author: Nalaka Gunawardene

A science writer by training, I've worked as a journalist and communication specialist across Asia for 30+ years. During this time, I have variously been a news reporter, feature writer, radio presenter, TV quizmaster, documentary film producer, foreign correspondent and journalist trainer. I continue to juggle some of these roles, while also blogging and tweeting and column writing. View all posts by Nalaka Gunawardene