Evolution of the Blogosphere

1967

• The Internet is born. It has been commercially available since 1988.

1979

• A decentralized system of discussion boards called the USENET (User Network) is created.

1994

• The online travelogue travel-library.com is launched as a community on USENET.

1996

• cyber24.com is launched by photographer Rick Smolan to promote collaborative photo blogging under a project named ‘24 hours in Cyberspace’.

1997

• John Barger, an American blogger, publishes short posts in reverse chronology calling them the ‘Robot Wisdom Weblog’ . Soon similar web pages came to be commonly known as weblogs.

1998

• Blog hosting-cum-online journal service called ‘LiveJournal’ is launched.

• ‘OpenDiary’, another online journaling tool is launched.

1999

• As a web joke, blogger Peter Merholz broke the term weblog as ‘we blog‘ in the sidebar of his blog ‘peterme.com’. The term later gave way for the new generic term Blog.

• The blog host ‘Blogger’ is launched by the Pyra Labs. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2003.
• A journal hosting tool for beginners called ‘DiaryLand’ is launched.

2001

• The advent of political blogging begins with ‘Instapundit’.
• One of the first audio blogs ‘Buzzgrinder’ is launched to enable members to upload mp3 files in to their blogs.
• The bloggies awards are initiated. The winners will be chosen by the public and blogs will be nominated in around 30 categories.

2002

• The photo blogging service ‘Picasa’ is launched by Idealab. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2004.
• One of the first blog search engines ‘Technorati’ is launched.

2003

• A travel blog called ‘BootsnAll’ is launched.
• One of the first vblogs ‘Metacafe’ is launched.

• The blog hosting-cum-social networking website ‘MySpace’ is launched.
• The photo blogging websites ‘Photobucket’ is launched. It will be taken over by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.
• One of the first open source blog hosting websites/ blog tools ‘WordPress’ is launched.

• The Weblog awards are initiated.  The winners are chosen by public votes.

2004

• The blog search engine BlogPulse is launched by ‘IntelliSeek’. It will be taken over by the Nielsen Company.
• A health based blog hosting service called ‘HealthDiaries’ is launched.

• The photo blog hosting service ‘Flickr’ is launched. It will be taken over by Yahoo! in 2005.
• The BOBs – Best of the Blogs awards are initiated. The winners are selected by an international jury of independent journalists, media experts and blog experts.

2005

• ‘Blogher’ – A women oriented blog hosting service is launched.
• One of the largest and video blogging site ‘DailyMotion’ is launched.
• Google introduces a blog search engine called ‘Google Blog Search’.
• Yahoo launches a blog hosting service – Yahoo! 360°

• One of the most popular video blogs ‘YouTube’ is launched. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2004.

2006

• One of the first micro-blogging website ‘Twitter’ is launched.
• Another micro-blogging service called ‘Jaiku’ is launched. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2009.

2008

• Another micro-blogging service called ‘Plurk’ is launched.