Rebecca's Weblog History

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Wow. Reading that was exhausting. I never did know where blogs came from, they just kind of forced themselves into the edges of my awareness until I actually saw some. But now that I've read the full history of blogs from inception to the turn of the century, I find myself wondering some things about their evolution.

Granted, every outlet of expression and information sharing goes through its share of changes in format and focus, but I can't see why the original blogs, weblogs, were left to toil in general obscurity so soon after they caught the computer-user's eye. The way that weblogs operated, providing a link to a webpage dedicated to specific information and including a contribution from the blogger, just seems so practical and objective. I imagine they became underappreciated with the advent of personal blogs, but even so, it seems a shame to me that so much objective material got shoved into the background of the World Wide Web. I think that the websurfing public could benefit greatly from sites so conducive to critical-thinking, as opposed to the media machines that pump out national trivia every 8 hours (read: MSN, AOL, Yahoo).

There will undoubtedly be many more changes in information sharing format over the next few years, and the way public internet users find information online may be entirely foreign to me by the time I graduate. This is quite an alarming thought, and not one I will readily accept when that time comes. With the rate of technological developments, my generation will soon be forced to adapt or be doomed to the tech-challenged reputation reserved for stubborn parents and grandparents of today before very long. The ultimatum leaves only one option to today's youth. As students in the age of technology, my peers and I must accept and adapt to change in online operations in order to survive in an ever-changing technological job market.