Media Revolution: Draw that Mammoth

As humans, we have always needed to express ourselves. From prehistoric cave painters to today's Twitter-er, we put our artistic efforts out there for others to enjoy, critique, admire and be inspired by. In primitive times, we only had a handful of peers looking at our work. You could be the best mammoth sketcher in the valley, or, say, the whole mountain range... Later, Gutenberg allowed us to reach a larger audience, sending paper packets around the globe. Today the Internet links us speedily to over 1.4 billion hardwired souls. The more people we connect with, the more useful the medium becomes.

In the stone-age of the Internet – the early 1990s – users shared similar interests through email lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). The first website appeared in August 1991 and the first "web log" followed a few years later. Swarthmore College Student Justin Hall began posting commentary in 1994 on Links from the Underground.(He's revved up Justin's Links now).

Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” in 1997, shortly after his website, www.robotwisdom.com, went live. Geeks jokingly split the new word to read "we blog" a few years later. In 1999, Peter Merholz shortened it to “blog”.That same year, Pitas, the first free publishing service, debuted. Pyra, Groksoup, Edit This Page and Velocinews soon followed.

Back then, blogging was the realm of the technically inclined; only a few hundred blogs lurked online when Pyra Labs released Blogger. For the first time, a printing press was available to anyone with an Internet connection. The barrier to broadcasting people's thoughts had dropped, and broadcast they did! Today over 100 million blogs blaze down the bandwidth – with another 64,000 coming online every day (or even 120,000, depending on your source).