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Who Invented Blogging?

Photo: Mike Licht-NotionsCapital.com/Flickr (CC)

Nov. 4 – There are many reasons to marvel at the rise of blogging. In just a few years, millions of people have taken to blogs to express themselves, while tens if not hundreds of millions of Internet users have turned to them as a way to get news, information and conversation.

Here’s what really astounds me: No one invented blogging.

I was struck by this fact while reading “Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, And Why It Matters,” by Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon.com. Over the course of the book Rosenberg attempts to wrap his arms around this unwieldy topic and trace its origins and impact.

In the first half of the book, Rosenberg reviews the small contributions made here and there that eventually set the stage for the blogging revolution. Rosenberg writes: “The efforts to identify a ‘first blog’ are comical, and ultimately, futile, because blogging was not invented; it evolved.”

So many of the most truly revolutionary innovations tend to be like that. Just think about the Internet itself. While there recently have been numerous celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the first message being sent on ARPANET, a precursor to today’s Web, really, the Internet we know today was the result of numerous contributions over the years, both big and small.

And even when it was about to burst into the mainstream, and quickly became part of the fabric of our everyday lives and

businesses, nobody really seemed to see it coming. Back in the early 1990s, big telecommunications and tech firms were investing billions of dollars in interactive TV they claimed we all wanted (and something I’m still not sure I do).

But we didn’t; instead, we jumped onto America Online and then the Internet.

More recently, this happened with Wi-Fi. In the late 1990s, the big telecom companies were focused on wireless broadband, superfast Internet access delivered over cellular networks, expected to take years to develop.

But instead grass-roots users embraced Wi-Fi, even though it was slower, had a smaller footprint, and had to overcome the challenge of harnessing together a number of technical pieces. I remember first using Wi-Fi when a student living across the street in a group house asked if he could put a Wi-Fi router on my DSL connection so they could piggyback off our high-speed connection. That was five years ago, and such hot spots have multiplied since then.