KEY POINTS:
Google is not the only online phenomenon to be 10 years old this year.
Blogging has also come of age - though there will be disagreement about even that, for the blogosphere is an argumentative place.
But at least the etymology of the term is not disputed. It comes from "weblog", a term coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997.
This was abbreviated a year later by Peter Merholz to "blog" (both a noun and a verb). Web-based blogging tools began to emerge in 1998 and went mainstream with the launch of Blogger.com in 1999. From 1998 anyone who could type and press "send" could become a global publisher, and a new organism entered our media ecosystem.
Initially, blogging had a bad press, at least in the press. Editors derided it as vanity publishing by egomaniacs. Who did these oiks think they were, imagining people would be interested in their views?
Working journalists - incredulous that people would write for no financial reward - ridiculed blogging as self-indulgent insanity.
It turned out that this was an epic misjudgement, but it took a few high-profile casualties to bring home the message. In 2002 the Republican majority leader in the US Senate, Trent Lott, was brought down by a story that was ignored by the mainstream media but kept alive within the blogosphere.
Then in 2005 the career of Dan Rather, the celebrated American TV network anchorman, was unceremoniously terminated when he (and his colleagues) casually dismissed bloggers' criticism of the evidence used in a 60 Minutes documentary about George W. Bush's national service.
One network executive sneered that the people who disputed the authenticity of the (faked) documents relied upon by the programme were nothing more than strange little men who sit at home and "write in their pyjamas". Big mistake: the guys in pyjamas knew their stuff.
Since then, disdain for blogging has been more muted, but has not entirely disappeared. The most enduring criticism has been that bloggers are not reporters but commentators and are thus parasites on "proper", professional journalism.
This took a bit of a knock during the early days of the Iraq war, when bloggers in Baghdad were the only reliable reporters of what was actually going on. In fact, the professional/amateur criticism is a somewhat simplistic representation of an emerging symbiotic relationship in which journalists and bloggers react to, and feed off, one another.
A more insightful perspective comes from regarding blogging as a new literary genre. This is the line taken by Andrew Sullivan, a magazine editor who has metamorphosed into an uber-blogger, in an essay published in the Atlantic.
Blogging is to writing, he says, "what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive".
Sullivan writes: "Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach - instantly - any reader on Earth.
Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor's nod, enduring a publisher's incompetence, or being ground to dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. With one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated."
So they did - to be replaced by obstreperous criticism from readers of blogs, who have no compunction about pointing out flaws in a blogger's argument and other lapses of fact.
This openness to immediate criticism and/or rebuttal is another revolutionary aspect of blogging.
All that remains is for English departments in universities to start studying blogging styles, for example the way in which accomplished online writers use hyperlinks.
If you read the work of established bloggers or contributors to slick online publications such as Salon or Slate what you see is a move from having hyperlinks clumsily embedded in a document to the use of links to provide an ironic counterpoint to the main line of the piece. It's all very, er, postmodern. But what do you expect? It is 2008.
- OBSERVER
