2001: the year blogging changed the world
Yet we wouldn't realise how much for two decades
Richard MacManus has made me overwhelmingly nostalgic via a post on his excellent CyberCultural blog:
At the beginning of 2001, most popular weblogs were a combination of personal journal and linkblog — a format encouraged by early blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal and Diaryland. But by the end of the year, blogging had become a real-time reporting tool too; most notably in the form of the “warblogs” that became popular after 9/11, like Talking Points Memo, Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish. The October launch of Movable Type was also a key moment in the professionalisation of blogging.
This was the era that drew me into blogging. The month after Movable Type launched, I started blogging at Livejournal. Within 18 months, this very blog was launched, initially on Blogger, and then on Movable Type. Some of those early bloggers – Andrew Sullivan, for example – were huge sources of inspiration for me.
This was the point that weblogs became blog; a shift from publishing links to cool internet shit, to a general personal publishing revolution. But it wasn't really in personal publishing that this moment would have its biggest impact. As MacManus points out:
During the final few months of 2001, journalists, academics and web designers began adopting Movable Type. It quickly became the platform of choice for serious bloggers, setting the standard for blogging software at least until WordPress arrived in 2003.
A stumble by Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, would propel WordPress to the front of blogging evolution. And it would, in turn, move away from being a tool for personal publishing to being a general-purpose website publishing service. Within a decade, an ordinary person could be publishing using the exact same tech as a major international newspaper.
And that flattening would unleash the problem of the ability of any publisher – including propagandists and misinformation merchants – to dress themselves in the clothes of journalism, and pollute the information ecosystem online.
The democratising of publishing that started in the late 90s but built its real momentum in the early 2000s has had a huge impact on the world. In 2003, I was positive about its impact. 22 years later, I think it's fair to say that the jury is still very much out. I attended an event by the newly-launched Centre for Democracy and Journalism at City St George's last night, that I'll write up when I get a moment, that addressed this problem head on.
But that critical confluence of technology that MacManus explores, blogging platforms becoming widely available just as the world order changed as two planes flew into the World Trade Centre, was an inflection action point, the beginning of a paradigm shift, that only seems clear in retrospect.
The post on Cybercultural that inspired this is one of a series of posts MacManus has been writing charting the emergence of the new media in the late 90s and early 2000s that's well worth following:
