500 years of Newspapers – How many years of blogs?

While the blogging “industry” is still in it’s infancy, I wonder if the blogosphere will have the lifespan of a giant tortoise at close to 200 years in captivity or the less than a decade lifespan of the Betamax videocassette.  Will blogs continue to evolve or will they one day follow the newspapers into the world of cold and harsh oblivion>?

Let’s briefly consider the life spans of the newspaper and the blog to begin to look towards the future.

The Roots of Blogging

While there there is no official start date for the blogging revolution, the earliest form of blogging dates back to 1997.  On December 17th 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” when he described the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that “logged” all the Internet sites he visited.  Then in October of 1998, Open Diary launched with software to make reader commenting available to a wide audience.  The software continued to develop and in 2003, with the release of both TypePad and WordPress, blogging began to explode.

Check out the entire blog here at Blogging Tips.