The widespread definition of a blog today is;

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

(From Wikipedia.)

I think it’s interesting that in the years between being an activity by a few people on the nascent World Wide Web and the mainstream role that blogs have in today’s digital landscape (depending on how you define a “blog”), the idea that a “weblog” is a log of the web seems to have been superseded by the idea of a log on the web.

The blogs of the late 1990s/early 2000s (ie. around the time that the word “blog” was actually coined) tended to be online diaries, telling personal and often quite intimate stories, often hidden behind the veil of an online pseudonym.

My favourite blog ever was mainly from around 1995-1996, so it definitely wasn’t called a ‘blog’ at the time (the term having been coined on 17th December 1997 when Jon Barger used it to describe how he logged the web as he surfed it..) It wasn’t a story about the web, although it was chronicled on it in a series of forum, newsgroup and mailing list postings. It ended up being called “One Love Story”, and was the autobiographical (although not strictly true, as the author later revealed) story of a New York lawyer who had a drug-induced moment of realisation about the “true” meaning behind the Stone Roses’ lyrics and music, which set him on a mission to become the (“real”) Second Coming himself. When events in the media started happening which fitted neatly in with his story, things became very interesting to follow as the numbers of people willing to stick up for someone who believed to have been called upon as the Second Coming grew. (I think it was this two-way nature of watching the story at least seeming to appear outside the internet that appealed to me the most; an idea that’s been capitalised on by activities like Alternate Reality Games.) To me, this chronicling of a story through the web, but as a conversation rather than the more introverted nature of an autobiography or diary is what marks it out as a blog.

But this was back in the early days of the world wide web. As blogs grew in popularity they became increasingly focussed around the world of politics, as they shifted from a relatively small number of bloggers talking to one another about their day to day lives to a larger number of people talking to one another about the things that mattered most to them. Blogging became less of a platform for a few to tell their stories, and more of a platform for ongoing conversation or debate.

Today, blogs are no longer restricted to relating the thoughts and experiences general public; it’s not unusual for large companies to try to sidestep the faceless corporate image by publishing the personal blogs of members of staff, and even the White House dog now has his own videoblog— featuring a cameo appearance by none other than Tony Blair….

Some companies even encourage such activity, which has resulted in something of a blurring of the lines between a personal blog and professional PR exercise. On the other hand, there are stories where blogs have caused problems for companies as unhappy workers have told their stories; in 2004, EA Spouse was a blogger who wrote about her fiance who worked as a software engineer at EA Games, and criticised their labour practices and enforced overtime. The blog struck a chord with a number of software engineers, and in 2006 her fiance was the main plaintiff in the successful class action suit on behalf of software engineers at EA, which awarded them $14.9 million dollars.

A key moment marking the transition of blogs as an influential media came in 2002, when comments by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott were discussed at length by a number of bloggers after a party honoring U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, where Lott praised Senator Thurmond by suggesting that the United States would have been better off had Thurmond been elected president in the 1940s. Lott’s critics saw these comments as a tacit approval of racial segregation, a policy which had been advocated by Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign. Documents and recorded interviews dug up by bloggers reinforced this viewpoint, but even though the comments were made at a public event attended by the media, none of the major media organizations reported on his controversial comments until after blogs broke the story. A political crisis resulted, which forced Lott to step down as majority leader.

The impact of this story showed how bloggers could sometimes lead the way in bringing key information to public light, with mainstream media having to follow their lead. (Although on the other hand, the idea of stumbling upon a cover up thanks to a particular piece of information that doesn’t seem to fit in with mainstream accounts of events can quickly lead to a plethora of conspiracy theories. It’s definitely easy for the real signals to get lost in the noise.)

More recently, the 2008 US presidential election has become an interesting race to watch online, not only because of the more significant role than ever that the internet is playing in the various campaigns, with YouTube, MySpace and Facebook being used by most of the presidential candidates to try to connect with younger voters, and a CNN/YouTube hosted debates between candidates, answering user-submitted questions (selected by YouTube and CNN.)

The lines between bloggers and mainstream media have now become blurred; breaking news on television will often rely on photos and video footage made by the general public, not only before the news agencies have had a chance to send their own journalists to the scene, but also in places where it’s simply not possible for journalists to get access— for example, the footage from the London Underground following the 7/7 bombings.

At the other end of the spectrum, the 2008 U.S. presidential election is looking likely to be heavily influenced by the internet; already, several large websites are getting involved in the debates; Yahoo! Answers has become a Q&A platform for voters and election candidates to ask and answers questions from one another, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are being used by candidates to try to connect with younger voters, and CNN and YouTube hosted a series of televised debates between presidential hopefuls from both the Democratic and Republican parties, with questions submitted by the public through YouTube.

A variant on blogging is “liveblogging”, which is posting to a blog as a situation actually happens (such as posting immediate reactions to a televised speech as it happens, or explaining what’s happening at a press conference or presentation for those unable to attend (frequently seen in the technology industry, such as the MacWorld opening earlier this year.) Then there are forms of blogging that make the most of specific communication technology “vlogs” (or video blogs) and Phlogs/Photoblogs and moblogs (mobile blogs.)

There are also new types of blogging emerging; “sideblogging” or “microblogging”, consisting of much shorter but more frequent posts and often featured at the side of a blog page. Examples of this type of blogging include Status Updates on social networking sites like Facebook, or the Twitter network (which also operates over SMS messages, Instant Messenger or email, beyond the confines of the web.)

Social Networking sites are now so popular that they can be called mainstream; an average of 1 in 2 at least occasionally using them, 68% of 20-24 year old women and even 1 in 8 45-55 year olds saying they use them regularly. Of course, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter change the visibility of the “blog”- if you’re posting updates to a private network of approved friends, behind a password-protected barrier, is that still fulfilling the “web” side of the definition?

This brings me back to my initial question. What is blogging? I’m not going to say that I can answer it definitively- blogging is clearly different things to different people, and not everyone who regularly posts online updates of what they are doing at any given time to a Facebook status update would call themselves a blogger (even less a ‘sideblogger’), even if what they are building still fits into the more technical definition of a ‘blog’. For me, blogging now means simply to put something up on the internet. Whether that’s on a personal site, a social networking site or a blogging network is irrelevant. What it’s about- yourself, your opinions, or just your favourite band- is equally irrelevant. Whether it’s part of a single collection of data or scattered across various websites is irrelevant. It’s simply the kind of activity that was done by “webmasters” back in the 90′s, and is done by bloggers, Facebookers and MySpacers today; actively creating content on the internet. But how you define a blogger definitely shapes how you answer what might be a bigger question.

Is blogging now mainstream?