From Jonathan's Reference Pages
In 1999, video game journalist Scott Sharkey started the website that would become Solidsharkey.com, a sort of personal homepage and internet journal. The term 'blog' had been coined only five months earlier, and wouldn't become ubiquitous until several years later. Sharkey didn't run a 'blog' - he ran a website:
"Every once in a while it hits me that I can use this space for whatever I want. Anything at all. I could use it to post my (nonexistent) prom pictures, or show how non-conformist I am by bitching about non-conformism. Maybe I could write a gripping page about Why I Think Religion Is Bad, or tell you all about this crazy fuckin Nintendo game I found, dude!
Or I could just write the above thinly veiled bitch about why every other web-diary I've read today bored the hemorrhaging fuck out of me. Not that mine is any more entertaining right now."
It may not be too grandiose a statement to say that sites like SolidSharkey.com marked the end of the simple "personal homepage" and the beginning of the blogging revolution. The individually owned websites of the mid-1990s have all but disappeared, replaced by increasingly professional "blogs".
The Web of 2008 is very different to the Web of 1998, and how people use the Internet has changed.
The first big change is content management. Prior to web services like Livejournal and CMS systems like Moveable Type, most websites were updated by hand. Users needed to know the ins and outs of web technologies like HTML and FTP, and this restricted access to two sorts of people: enthusiasts, maintaining their own little slice of the Internet for its own sake, and entrepreneurs, who could afford to pay someone to do it for them.
When technology gave every user the means to create websites, websites were no longer anything special. Suddenly it was the content that mattered most, not the amount of technical skill or funding available. We got a sort of division of labour, and now content specialists rule supreme.
For many reasons, including the psychology of web users and content creators, the 'blog' is simply a more successful publishing platform.
Short posts are easily updated, encouraging frequent updates and regular visitors, cementing the site's numerical popularity. Where the 1990s personal homepage thrived on long feature articles or stagnant knowledgebases, the blog is almost by definition continually refreshed. Like a newspaper, readers come back time and time again.
"Blog" has become synonymous in the media with "popular, authoritative website", much like "hacker" has shifted from "computer enthusiast" to "computer criminal". This doesn't mean that most blogs are successful - the majority aren't - but a reflection on the qualities that make a successful website.
Generally put, a website needs to supply a steady stream of value to readers if it expects to acquire and retain a user base. Personal homepages were often updated at the maintainer's whim, and didn't have guarantees of new content that modern blog does.
Nor did they guarantee content relevant to the reader's interests. As blogging became more popular and prominent blogs emerged, it became clear that a key to remaining a hit was to adhere to one topic that will appeal to the same user over and over. Split your content between two different topics, and you divide your strength.
If Sharkey's site was popular long after blogs overtook personal homepages, we can attribute it to three main factors. First, it stuck to one topic, or at least to one general appeal: sarcastic humour and old videogames. Second, it updated just often enough to draw readers back. Third, the webmaster was happy to update the site even before web advertising became popular.
Page created: 19th October 2008
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