Blog

Blogging has and still is becoming a major sensation around the world for expressing ideas, thoughts, feelings, and information. The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, or journalists. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is recognized as one of the earliest bloggers. Early blogs were manually updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today.
After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the arrival of the first hosted blog tools. Such hosted tools consist of Open Diary, created in October 1998, which soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries. Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999. Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a news page on a Web site, followed by Diaryland in September 1999, focusing more on a personal diary community. Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan made blogger.com in August 1999.
Since 2002, blogs have gained increasing notice and coverage shaping news stories. For the first time in modern journalism, the financial and political goals of U.S. Israeli relations are being analyzed in depth. The Iraq war saw bloggers taking measured and intense points of view that go beyond the traditional left-right divide of the political spectrum.
Blogging might become even more popular then facebook and myspace in upcomming years.