The first blog systems
have been simple editorial systems, easening the publishing procedure of such chronological entries for amateurs. Blog Hosting Services should allow anybody to run a free weblog. In 1997 Xanga counted 100 such diaries, while end of 2005 the number was close to 50 million!
- Open Diary (since October 1998) was the first to allow commenting of entries…
- LiveJournal was launched in March 1999,
- Pitas.com started it´s platform July Juli 1999,
- Successor Diaryland concentrated on private blogs from September 1999,
- Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) conquered the market with blogger.com. The latter platform was bought by Google end of February 2003 - but that´s another story (see Blog Hosting).
- In 2002 Markos Moulitsas Zuniga started blog community DailyKos, who counts up to one million visitors today..
Political correctness
Blogs with political content soon showed up to be the most successful genre. Most read – yesterday like today – blogs like Andrew Sullivan´s andrewsullivan.com, Ron Gunberger´s politics1.com, Taegan Goddard´s politicalwire.com and Jerome Armstrong´s MyDD.
When US senator Trent Lott praised the racist senator Strom Thurmond in public, it was the massive pressure of the blogosphere to end Lott´s political success – while “classical media” ignored the story nobly.
Warblogs – the Breakthrough in 2003
The first warblogs evolved during the invasion of US troups in Afghanistan in 2001, when Matt Welch called his point-of-view warblog first time.
It was the war between USA and Iraq in 2003, that literally got warblogs in the center of cross fire. So called “embedded journalists” had been accredited to accompany the US troups – at least as long they sent home complaisant reports. That called private observers, who reported authentically – from both sides. The Iraqi Salam Pax achieved worldwide attention, when he published his warblog as book..
This hype about warblogs – mainly written by amateurs -, surprised and alienated publishers of classical media…