I’m guessing you probably read the title of this post and thought to yourself “psh, c’mon, I obviously know what a blog is!” Yes, blogs have completely infiltrated the web and they’ve become a pivotal component of content marketing efforts for companies big and small. But the world of blogs and blogging has come a long way since its inception in the late ’90s. Considering that many of us read multiple blogs a day or are regular contributors to blogs, it’s an interesting exercise to jump on board the time machine and check out the evolution of blogs as we know them today.

So Tell Me! What is a Blog?

According to good ol’ Wikipedia, a blog is a portmanteau (word of the day: this is a great one!) of web log and is formally known as “a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries (posts).”

Interestingly enough, the term ‘blog’ started off as a joke by pioneer blogger, Peter Merholz, who split up the phrase ‘weblog’ into ‘we blog’ in 1999 on the side of his personal blog. The term ‘blog’ picked up from there and evolved into what’s now a pinnacle component of media, publishing, business, and personal activity!

The Early Ages

Chances are that many of the blogs you read are business-related in nature and discuss topics related to a particular industry, product, or company. However, the first blogs did not have this intent: rather, they were mainly personal in nature and bloggers considered themselves to be diarists. In other words, blogs were online diaries where people expressed their personal thoughts and activities.

During this era, many companies had “News” sections on their website which usually consisted of single-paragraph updates about press coverage or product/corporate news. To make any updates to their News section, companies needed to go through their dev team (imagine how much more time and resource intensive this process would be!). Unlike today where blogs can be managed through third-party software, such as WordPress, blogs in the old days were actually part of a company’s website and needed to be updated accordingly.

The Post-2009 Era

The year 2009 marked the time when blogs as we know it today started taking shape. Around this time, multi-author blogs that were professionally edited started popping up. Images and links were widely incorporated into text, along with other forms of media, such as video. The rapid adoption of social media, especially micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, served (and still serve) as a portal for bloggers to easily share their content. In essence, blogs started to function as their own social networking forums where readers could contribute their views and reactions to a piece.

Times Have Changed, Haven’t They?

When we think of the Internet and technological world, we’re generally of the mindset that things are evolving quickly: there’s a rapid adoption of tools, technologies, and trends that are changing the landscape and the arena where companies play. In light of this, it’s even more interesting to come across predictions that were made 4 years ago regarding the future of blogs — and to see that these predictions still hold true today. In an interview with Time Magazine in 2009, Scott Rosenberg, one of the first online bloggers, was asked the question “what’s next for blogs?” His response is one that still rings true:

“Text blogs will not change that much. They are a mature and established form, and people who write on the Web will continue to find them useful. Video is in a state of huge growth; video blogging and podcasting are extensions of blogging in different directions. Personally, I find it much harder to consume a lot of video, but I’m middle-aged at this point. I’m sure there are people who are going to figure out how to do things with video online that I can’t even imagine.”

Are platforms such as Vine and Keek the video revolutions Rosenberg alluded to? Will blogs continue to serve the purpose they do now or will they evolve further in the next 5 years? Tell us your predictions in the comments!

About the Author

After graduating from the HBA program at the Richard Ivey School of Business, Aaliyah launched her career as Marketing Coordinator at Uberflip! Prior to her HBA, Aaliyah also completed a Bachelor in English at Western University.

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