A short history of blogging*

A really long time ago, blogs were written on paper. But they weren't called blogs, they were called journals. And they usually weren't shared with anybody else, except sneaky little brothers or nosy parents. Sometimes, really famous people would write really long blogs about themselves and publish them. I think they were called memoirs.

Then computers came along. People started typing their journals in their computer's word processor for no reason other than the fact that things always look more professional when they're typed.

Then Al Gore invented the internet. Online journals started becoming popular. People really seemed to like the idea of sharing their innermost thoughts, desires, embarrassments and break-ups with the rest of the world because people are weird like that. Though nobody really liked reading them because they were sort of depressing.

Somewhere around this time, Live Journal came about. Remember that? You had to have somebody invite you before you could sign up. It was like this exclusive club of sharing. People that had an account thought they were hot shit.

And then somehow the word blog came along. I don't know when, how, where, or why, because I can't be bothered with insignificant details like that. But it did. And then there was Blogger, which is owned by Google, and like most things from Google, widely popular. And people found out that they can post whatever they want--recipes, family secrets, their credit card numbers (though this wasn't necessarily recommended), funny stuff...whatever they felt like, they wrote about. And, surprisingly, people actually liked reading them. And they would comment and be all like, "you're super awesome and I love you. Will you have my puppies?"

And then these bloggers found out they could get paid for it. So they quit their jobs, took their dogs for a walk, and wrote blogs all day.

The end.

*By "history," I really mean "randomly made up crap sprinkled with true things that have absolutely no relevance to the history of blogging." So the title should really read "A short history of randomly made up crap sprinkled with true things that have absolutely no relevance to the history of blogging of blogging." But that title doesn't sound as cool. Please don't use this post as a source in your research paper about the history of blogging. I'd feel really bad for you getting an "F". But if you want to use this as a source in your research paper about awesomeness, go right ahead.