Apparently, today is the ten year anniversary of blogging, or at least the term blogging. I know that I've been blogging for at least that long, even though I don't think I started calling it blogging until I set my account up on Blogger.com. As someone who has watched it progress, I can tell you that it has changed significantly from when I started playing with it.
I first started in blogging shortly after I learned the basics of HTML around 1996ish or so. A couple Internet providers finally came to town, and I wound up ditching my dial-in BBS for the wonders of the World Wide Web. After mastering the HTML basics from downloading other's work and cheating up a bit with HoTMetaL Pro, I took the local BBS scene magazine GUI magazine out of the command line and into HTML. We updated once a month by hand, and it was more of a one-to-one translation of a magazine online (with page numbers and everything) than it was a blog.
After the BBS scene completely evaporated into the ether (it's hard to dial into BBS's when everyone has their lines all busied up while they're dialed into the Internet), I started working full time as a Web designer at the local ISP, and began experimenting with new posting formats.
Unfortunately, posting without a content management tool was very time-consuming, so I wound up opening an account at Diaryland. I posted there until late 2002. Due to a number of personal issues and general burn-out, I took a break from maintaining an online persona for a while (and filled up two paper journals full of random musings - I just can't not write, it appears). During my absence, the Blogger platform was written, which I then discovered in the summer of 2003. I wound up importing all my old posts from my previous platforms into the system.
As I came back up for air, though, the landscape of blogging had changed dramatically. It was less about personal experiences, and beginning to look a bit more like an outlet for news junkies. My personal blog started to take on a look that reflected the change memes in the blogosphere, one part blog about my work, one part blog about personal life, and one part about politics.
It is also probably nothing more than coincidence that as the blogosphere started becoming of a primary source for information, especially in the case of folks like Salam Pax and presidential bloggers, I too had more opportunities to blog on things as a primary resource aside from the inner workings of my company and personal life. Living in Miami at the time, I was able to blog to moderately large audiences the bevy of hurricanes South Florida received, as well as the bevy of Paris Hilton thrown parties, presidential debates, and rap-star shootings.
By 2005, my blog hadn't really achieved critical mass in terms of traffic, and the mainstream media had discovered both blogging and podcasting. It is interesting to note that most chronicles of blogging history are rather sketchy in the details of 2005 to the present of how blogging has evolved. I think that can be mostly attributed to the fact that blogging, at that point, had reached the mainstream, and the bleeding edge had been pushed out to other formats, like podcasting, online video, and now status microblogging and life-streaming (interesting how it all comes full circle?). Team-blogging with limited personal life-story dominates the the most popular blogs of just about every stripe, and personal bloggers have been relegated to the outer rims in the definition of blogging, like Facebook and MySpace.
You Mashable readers are likely aware of this already, as your interest in the topics and sites we cover naturally leads you to be on the leading edge of where information and communication are. But where you are today is where the masses will be not long from now; if there's anything we've learned by watching the evolution of the social media of blogging so far, that is it.