Reflecting on week three’s coursework, an element of digital community and blogging that resonated with me is around the evolution of blogging originally being centred around personal voice, through to now the most successful and prominent blogs being associated with media organisations.
In reviewing the chronological history of blogs, I was excited to learn of Justin Hall’s blog, widely considered the first blog to have existed (Swinburne, 2022). His first blog post was a simple introduction about himself, and the blog website format was reflective of early internet where fonts weren’t fashionable with pixelated images, as opposed to today where crisp images and quality video is key.
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From the origin of blogging, through to 2004 when Merriam-Webster dictionary named ‘Blog’ word of the year (Swinburne, 2022), personal blogs gained significant traction and indeed there was a wave of prominent bloggers who emerged. An example of a blogger who gained affluence at this time was Perez Hilton who started blogging in 2004 (ABCNews, 2007) with a celebrity gossip site which gained notoriety, with Perez being coined the most hated person on the internet for his sometimes mean and personal takedowns with poorly drawn scribbles on celebrity photos (ABCNews, 2007).
However, in 2022 the blogging landscape looks quite different. Blogs tend to be polished, professional, certainly in contrast to Justin Hall’s blog. The personal voice of early 2000’s blogs no longer dominates, and if we look at the top 10 most successful blogs (Stupid Blogger), the similarities are that these sites are all associated and run as media organisations with journalists and editors, no longer is one voice dominant.
Indeed, with the introduction of microblogging social platforms such as Twitter, visual diary of Instagram, and most recently video microblogging on Tik Tok, the landscape has again evolved, and as a millennial following various iterations of blogging and microblogging, I certainly struggle to keep up! Each platform has it’s own vernacular and unique communication characteristics, such as grammar and style (Martin Gibbs et al. 2015), which as a non-digital native can be hard to follow (But I haven’t given up just yet, thank you Tik Tok #fyp).
References
stupidblogger n.d., Most Famous Top 10 Successful Blogs, viewed 31 January 2022, <https://www.stupidblogger.com/top-10-successful-blogs-2.html>.
Swinburne Online 2022, ‘Syllabus’, MDA20009: Digital Communities, Learning materials in Canvas, Swinburne University of Technology, viewed 3 December 2022
Wadley, G, Carter, C & Gibbs, M, 2015, Voice in Virtual Worlds: The Design, Use, and Influence of Voice Chat in Online Play, Human-Computer Interaction, pp 336-365.
Wright, A, Reynolds, T, 2007, The Man Behind Hollywood’s most hated site, ABC News, viewed 3 December 2022 <https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3398175>
Images
Justin Hall’s personal site, 1994, Justin’s Home Page, viewed 3 December 2022 < http://www.links.net/vita/web/start/original.html>
Perez Hilton blog [Photo], New York Times, viewed 3rd December 2022, <https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/fashion/29perez.html>