The History of Blogging | Big Think

The History of Blogging

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Jeffrey Zeldman was a blogger back when blogging was still just another form of “independent publishing.”

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Jeffrey Zeldman:

Jeffrey Zeldman was one of the first designers, bloggers, and independent publishers on the web, and one of the first web design teachers. In 1998, he co-founded—and from 1999 to 2002 he directed—The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition that helped bring standards to our browsers.

He publishes A List Apart “for people who make websites;” has written two books (notably the foundational web standards text, Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition); co-founded the web design conference An Event Apart; and founded and is executive creative director of Happy Cog™, an agency of web design and user experience specialists.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why did you start blogging?

Jeffrey Zeldman: So, 1995, worked on my first website for a client with two partners; pretended we knew what we were doing, we didn’t. There were three million web users and 1.5 million people were looking at our website. That was half the web. Nobody has numbers like that now and people have many more millions but then nobody, maybe Google has numbers like that, but it would have any Google somebody like that 50% of the web.

I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I’d fail at all these different professions. And in the normal scheme of things, you can’t really reach a large audience on your own. You can tour as a musician but people won’t come to see you if you don’t have a major record deal; or at least when I was doing it, that was the problem.

If you’re Joan Jett, you go out there anyway, and then she make it and she was awesome. But a lot of us went out there, didn’t make it.

And then I was a journalist but I was starving. And I’ve written fiction, but I couldn’t get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising and even there, I have a great idea that client won’t buy it.

I keep honing my persuasion skills to try what you. You can only be as good as your client. Or I had a great client ,and I had a great campaign, and the client bought it, and then the client said, we just want to see what’s the different font and the creative director said, “No, the meeting is over.”

I had no control over my creative product. And I had no control over trying to reach an audience.

And then in 1995, I made a website and half the web came to see it and I thought, man, that’s it, that’s want I want to do. So, I started my site examone.com immediately and I thought, I have to be entertainer.

I didn’t blog it right away. At first I was made to think of part of my icons, which is sort of a parity of all the horrible icons that were out there, but that also look kind of Yahoo inspired. The idea was, everyone could use them and all the early forms. People would use them; and it was huge.

We get an Ad Graveyard, or basically any ad that got killed. That was funny. You could publish there.

But I started writing a page which I mean, we haven’t figured out information architecture or anything. I said so, I called it Coming The HTML--because I would write about things that were coming to the website soon.

And I don’t know how many people, but I had a big following right away because there was a lot of stuff on the web. And the Ad Graveyard was funny; and part of my icons was funny. So, people came and I also knew how to work Yahoo, how to I get my stuff listed on Yahoo, which remember, back then, that’s where people found web content. It was like, did navigate that from Yahoo and then go, “Oh, advertising, the Ad Graveyard. That sounds interesting.”

So, I had followers. And the page where I’m talking about what was coming to the website next. I started talking about other content and what content on the web should be like, with a tutorial called Ask Doctor Web about how to do web design. Because I thought, man, this scheme, that was so cool and it’s so easy. Everyone will learn it and everyone will be a web designer. I was euphoric and I believe that everyone has a creative spark inside of them and everyone was going to do this.

Eventually, a lot of people did, but it took a generation of blogging tools and even Twitter for people to go, “Okay the barrier's low enough.” I thought HTML was a low barrier, but I just always more motivated.

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