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Usenet is born as a decentralized network of discussion boards.
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The mod.ber newsgroup is started on Usenet. It was started as a place for its founder, Brian Redman, and his friends to post interesting things they discovered online and offline. While it was not called a Blog, it had many characteristics of modern blogs. It ceased operation after 8 months.
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Listserv is born. Listserv is an email discussion group.
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Tim Berners-Lee writes his proposal for creating what would become the World Wide Web titled, "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a Hypertext Project".
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Tim Berners-Lee publishes the first web page. Click here to see it.
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John Carmack, programmer of Wolf 3D, Doom, & Quake, begins using the .plan text file on his internet account to keep gamers up to date on his projects. He continues to use the .plan updates until switching to his WWW blog on December 31, 2004.
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Justin Hall creates what is considered the first Blog.
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Dave Winer starts Scripting News. His company, Userland releases blog and website publishing software...Frontier, Manila, and Radio Userland.
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John Barger starts "Robot Wisdom Weblog". The term <strong>Weblog</strong> is soon coined as the term to use for online journals.
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Open Diary becomes the first online blog system that allowed readers to comment on blog posts.
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Brad Fitzpatrick starts LiveJournal.
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Wanting to use an XML format to distribute news, stories and information, Netscape develops and releases the RSS framework.
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Pyra Labs creates and launches blogger.com. Blogger.com becomes the most popular blooging site and soon helps to mainstream blogging.
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Dave Winer send a Grateful Dead song via a RSS enclosure. This was the predecessor of the first Podcast.
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Heather Armstrong is fired after discussing her job on her blog.
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Gizmodo is launched. This is the beginning of the first big blog empire.
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Google launches its online advertising system designed to match ads to blog content.
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Dave Winer updates the RSS format to support audio enclosures. The RSS feed was originally released for NPR Talkshow Host Christopher Lydon's blog.
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John Calacanis launches Weblogs, Inc. The company eventually grows to 85 high profile blog sites.
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Dave Winer and others host the first Bloggercon Conference.
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Adam Curry releases his script for moving MP3 files from Userland Radio's RSS feed to iTunes.
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Steve Garfield starts the first video podcast.
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Writer Ben Hammersley suggests three terms (Audioblogging, Podcasting, & GuerillaMedia) to use for the process of portable listening of audioblogs. Guess which term won out.
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Apple sends a Cease and Desist letter to stop iSpider's iPodder Project.
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Merriam-Webster declares "Blog" as the Word of the Year.
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A study is released revealing that 32 million Americans read blogs.
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Garrett Graff becomes the first blogger to receive crendentials for the daily White House briefings.
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John Calacanis sells his blog network to AOL for $25,000,000.
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Over $100 million in blog ads are sold over the year.
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Twitter becomes the first Microblogging site.