In order to understand how blogs made their appearance in the mindscape of users, you need to understand the history of the internet. Blog is a short form of WEBLOG that blogging websites allowed users to create ever since the internet was opened to the public in 1991. Though, it was developed as a research project in 1968 as ARPANET, an acronym for Advanced research projects agency network.
A Peek Into the History of the Web
The idea of developing the internet was to develop an indestructible tele-communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack. And therefore the internet came into being as a network of interconnected computers that enabled scientists to share a file with everyone in their peer network by sharing the uniform resource locator of the file with everyone. This went on for 23 years when military establishments, scientists and academics used the internet for a limited period only. It was in 1991 when Tim Berners Lee released a research paper that enabled universal access of each website by wrapping the domain name server with the IP address. His paper was accepted by the scientific community and an international protocol was developed for developing web pages and html and xml languages came into being.Blogging as a Branding Tool
Initially netizens could not decipher the true power of blogging as it was used as a daily diary kind of functionality where they could write their daily thoughts and share them with close friends. But later on companies realized that bloggers who had a huge fan following could become opinion makers and opinion terminators and influence the purchase of the brand that represented the product of the service. Millions of blogs came up as blogging became a tool to showcase knowledge, skill, talent and depth of reasoning and comprehension ability. Photo blogs emerged and so did video blogs along with picture blogs and even websites turned into a blog. Companies started advertising on highly popular blogs opening a vast revenue stream for those who could express themselves with the written word.
Internet visibility optimization began for blogs with the emergence of Google!
When blogs became uncountable, the challenge became to come on top of search results for certain keywords phrases that defined the essence of the brand. Copy-writing took a different turn with keyword phrases being dispersed within the body copy to help search engine bots match the keywords entered in the omnibox of the search engine with the phrases mentioned in the text. Slowly these strategies began to yield fruit and an entire industry of search engine optimizers came up that drew content from content writers and marketed it heavily across the web.
Blogging became better defined with the emergence of article directories where proper articles were submitted with summary, author description, subheadings, and catchy headlines became the norm. Social bookmarking sites became a force multiplier for bloggers as every good blog could be shared to a database and these sites pinged other readers, each time an entry was made into these sites.
With each Google update, the need for longer, high quality blogs has been increasing and original high quality content has been rewarded by the market throughout the history of the internet.
