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The Blog Rewoven

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The Blog Rewoven

Typing the address http://www.pepysdiary.com into the address bar of a browser brings an oddly appropriate juxtaposition of a 17th century diary and a modern day blog to the screen. A person can log on each day and find out what Samuel Pepy was doing on this particular day in 1661. Yet to the side, there is a list of links that can take the reader to background information on Pepy’s time period; along the top are links to information about Samuel Pepy, and underneath each entry are annotations made by the various readers of the blog. Still more links are found throughout the text of the entry taking the reader to information on the names and places mentioned within the writing itself. While the analogy between a diary and a blog is not exact, in Pepy’s diary one can see the forerunner of the blog and get a sense of how it came to be. Samuel Pepy wrote in order to keep track of his daily doings and make sense of his world. For the blog, what began as a small community trying to make sense of the growing web of information has grown into a huge social phenomenon that has moved beyond just programmers to the average person on the web.

When asked exactly what a blog is, people will give out a variety of answers but “an online journal” is the most common response. Dave Winer started one of the earliest weblogs, which is currently the longest running blog on the net. He started Scripting News in April of 1996 and it still functions in the same capacity today as it did then. He wrote an article entitled “What are weblogs?” and in this article he gives four key points that define what a blog is: personal, on the web, published, and a community. He feels these are defining in the context of what a blog is. It is im...

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...d.net/essays/weblog_history.html>. 15 Nov. 2004.

Bruner, Rick E. “Blogging is Booming.” iMedia Connection. 5 April 2004.

< http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/3162.asp>. 22 Nov. 2004.

Duguid, Paul. and John Seely Brown. “The Social Life of Documents.” Tribble, Evelyn B. and

Anne Trubek, Eds. New York: Longman, 2003. 104-121.

Johnson, Steven. “Links.” Writing Material: Readings from Plato to theDigital Age.

Tribble, Evelyn B. and Anne Trubek, Eds. New York: Longman, 2003. 195-213.

Ong, Walter. “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” Writing Material: Readings

from Plato to theDigital Age. Tribble, Evelyn B. and Anne Trubek, Eds.

New York: Longman, 2003. 315-337.

Winer, Dave. “What are weblogs?” Weblogs.com 16 Nov. 2001.

<http://newhome.weblogs.com/personalWebPublishingCommunities>.

15 Nov. 2004.
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