A Weblog was originally literally a log of the web, that is, of sites deemed interesting by the Weblog owner. As the genre expanded with easy to install and use blogging software such as Blogger and Moveable Type, this metamorphosed into a diary / journal format that constituted an accessible way to publish for free; "Weblog" became "Blog", authors became Bloggers, the search for audience became paramount and the Blog phenomenon was born.
John Dvorak of PC Magazine sees "The Blog Phenomenon" as a next generation vanity web page (but as we'll see, it's really more than that). He goes further a month later in deconstructing the blog to enumerate eight spoof rules for a perfect Blog; a devoted blogee orients her whole life around daily, or hourly, blog updates. Preferably unemployed, or if paid, hating her job and blogging at work, she (for many devoted blogees are female) shows her dedication to the blogging community by citing other favourite blogs often and refers to their authors in personal terms as if in a personal relationship. She'll use "colorful" language and pepper her blog entries with the latest jargon to show that she's not out of touch. To show that she's a trenchin' blogista (you heard it here first chaps) she'll stir up controversy in a regular manner usually by slagging off someone else's blog, or complaining bitterly that she's not on the "A-list", or just demanding to be placed or returned to someone else's "blog roll".
Among the first articles about blogging was Rebbeca Mead's article for the New Yorker entitled "You've got Blog" in November 2000. In it she describes the activity of blogging using blogspeak such as "troll" :
A blog consists primarily of links to other Web sites and commentary about those links. Having a blog is rather like publishing your own, on-line version of Reader's Digest, with daily updates: you troll the Internet, and, when you find an article or a Web site that grabs you, you link to it--or, in weblog parlance, you "blog" it. Then other people who have blogs--they are known as bloggers-- read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog.
This article goes on to describe the "blog abetted romance of Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan" and thereby documented the social impact of this new publishing form.
In "weblogs: a history and perspective" also from the dawn of weblogging, September 2000, Rebecca Blood writes:
These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them. Out of the myriad web pages slung through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling.
Needless to say, "You've got Blog" has been deconstructed by Joe Clark at Fawny.org in an article that some people find irritating. Joe complains about:
- the "unbearable incestuousness of blogging" (I'll leave the reader to discern what that means),
- "The A-List" (sic) - the blogging elite whose blogs are blogged by anyone who is anyone, and
- the Golden Age when Blogs were new and few
Clay Shirky's article Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality explains the rise of the A-List ("a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world") and he maintains that "freedom of choice makes stars inevitable". A techie read but instructive.
Tom Coates at plasticbag.org (note the cute domain name), he who found Joe Clarke's article irritating, gives a list of the articles printed in the book "We've got Blog" which can be read online thus saving the price of a book and a few trees. And see Microcontent News: resources for an Unofficial Glossary of Weblog Terms: short but fun.