Wow, talk about a geek phase this week: MySpace, Vox and now, Blogger. I notice Markoos is using the new Blogger beta (what the heck is that logo of?), which has some extra features, probably to fight the new services coming on stream. And, I should mention, since I am the man who remembers anniversaries, Blogger did celebrate its seventh birthday last week.
   Evan Williams, who founded Pyra, which developed Blogger originally, wrote on his blog on August 23, 1999:

We just launched a cool new tool at Pyra. It’s called Blogger. It’s an automated weblog publishing tool. … Blogger FTP’s your updated weblog page to your own server after each post. This means you can have everything “under the same roof,” as Jack [not me] put it the other day … no one even has to know you're using Blogger.

   Reading these words makes me feel a little nostalgic, and takes me back to the days when we were licensing content to the AltaVista Entertainment Zone. The internet held so much promise. They were innocent words, explaining a new concept to the public. Can you imagine what we must have been like to not have had an idea about this concept in 1999? Now, of course, the existence of such a tool is so obvious and part of daily life—to the point where blogger is a regular word. A television salesman may have had to give a similar spiel back in the 1950s: ‘It’s like radio, with pictures.’
   Who would have thought he’d sucker me in to using it four years later and that I prefer it to the likes of Vox, Wordpress et al? Happy birthday, Blogger. More than any other venture, I think of it as the one that helped turn everyday people into self-publishers.
   In fact, I thought some of the earliest adopters of Blogger were certifiable weirdos, and that was what turned me off. These were people with few design skills, but needed a way to get their voices heard. Prior to them, we early HTML-based web publishers could keep the internet relatively clean, among a select few who could put together a web page that looked smart and got an audience. After Blogger, and its successors, others managed to get online.
   The good news is that among the weirdos there were gems, too—smart people who deserved to be heard. But even by 2003, I was a sceptic—and I know I have this record of being a digital pioneer, having started virtual companies in the 1980s and got into digital publishing in the early 1990s. Why? Because it was still hard finding the smart people, at least outside the computing industry. Yet in marketing, they were beginning to emerge as a community, reaching a critical mass that touched my own network of people (namely Johnnie Moore)—and from their sites I discovered the rest: Gaping Void, Steve Rubel, and the rest.
   But I agreed with my Medinge colleagues that a Beyond Branding blog in 2003 made perfect sense to update what we wrote in the book; though it still took me two years after that before I got hooked into becoming a weekly, then daily, blogger. And here I am, certifiable myself, where 40 posts a month is a quiet month. Sad bastard.

Del.icio.us tags: history digital internet publishing Blogger Posted by Jack Yan, 06:36  permalink

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