The Blogosphere Blossoms in 2003 As RSS Readers Catch On
In 2003, the read/write web becomes a reality when blog software enables anyone to write to the web. Meanwhile, RSS Readers like NetNewsWire and Bloglines bring distribution to the blogosphere.
So far in my history of blogging and RSS, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs," and then became an interconnected ecosystem called the blogosphere in 2002. In 2003, blogging continued its evolution into a new form of media publication — helped greatly by the rapid adoption of RSS Readers.
In April 2003, I started a new technology blog called Read/WriteWeb (which I soon began abbreviating to RWW). While I'd experimented with blogging the previous year, my first effort — a linkblog called Modern Web — didn't stick. This time I was determined to write original posts and to regularly update RWW. I thought having a distinct topic focus would help, so I decided to write about blogging, RSS, and all the new web technologies starting to make waves at that time.
My first post (which I've since replanted on Cybercultural) explained what I meant by a “read/write web”:
“The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it. The web was never just supposed to be a one-way publishing system, but the first decade of the web has been dominated by a tool which has been read-only — the web browser. The goal now is to convert the web into a two-way system. Ordinary people should be able to write to the web, just as easily as they can browse and read it.”
Before blogging took off in the early 2000s, creating an online publication required a level of technical nous that most people didn’t have. Since I was a web geek and managed websites in my day job (in 2003, I worked for a New Zealand power company), I did actually have that technical ability. But I was in a minority and I could see in 2003 that blogging was a game-changer for web publishing — anyone could now do it! As I put it in that debut RWW post:
“Products like Radio Userland, Movable Type and Blogger help people set up a web presence by giving them templates to enter their content into and a simple ‘point and click’ method of publishing it. With weblogs, ordinary people now have the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and opinions to the World Wide Web, in conjunction with browsing the web. We are approaching a read/write web.”
I used Radio Userland when I started RWW, but the following year I switched to Movable Type. The beauty of the blogosphere at that point, though, was that you had complete control over your blogging tools. As I discussed at length in my memoir, this would change with the rise of Web 2.0 and its proprietary social networks over the rest of the decade. In 2003, we didn't know how good we had it.
Google Buys Blogger
The simplest blogging tool in 2003 was Blogger, which was entirely browser-based. “Push-button publishing for the people” was its motto. Its about page in April 2003 described the publishing process:
“… you provide Blogger a template of your page (or use one of several pre-designed ones) that indicates where you want your posts to appear. When you want to publish something, you simply enter it in a form. When you're ready, you hit a ‘Publish’ button that will automatically send your new page to your web server. No muss. No fuss. Total control.”
Blogger did have more advanced functionality that the likes of me could use (“your template can even contain script, such as server-side includes, ASP, or Cold Fusion pages”), but most people stuck to the defaults. Blogger was easy to use and blogs on it were easy to identify, since most of them used the default “blogspot.com” URL. Since its launch in 1999, it had gained enough traction to catch the eye of bigger companies. In fact, a couple of months before I began RWW, Blogger was acquired by Google.
“Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals,” wrote Silicon Valley reporter Dan Gillmor on February 15, 2003.
Google wasn’t yet a public company at this point, and had only recently begun to turn a profit — thanks to its AdWords online advertising system, introduced in 2000. But clearly it saw something promising in what Blogger was doing. Gillmor explained it well in his writeup:
“The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.”
As well as being a growing ecosystem, blogs were fertile ground for AdWords — probably the main reason Google bought Blogger. At the time of the purchase, Blogger had 1.1 million registered users according to co-founder Evan Williams (who would later co-found Twitter). Williams estimated that about 200,000 people were actively running weblogs on Blogger.
Blogging Communities
Radio UserLand was a bit more complicated than software like Blogger and LiveJournal. It was a desktop client, had its own scripting language, and also included an RSS aggregator. It was the latter feature, an RSS Reader, that really opened my eyes to the wonders of the blogosphere. I discovered a bunch of other blogs that also ran on Radio Userland — including Jon Udell's Weblog and Robert Scoble's Scobleizer, but also lesser known Radio blogs that caught my imagination, like Lilia Efimova's Mathemagenic and Dina Mehta's Conversations With Dina.
Thanks in large part to the combo of read and write functionality in Radio Userland, I quickly became an active member of a community of tech and knowledge management bloggers. In this corner of the blogosphere, there were a couple of hot-button topics: open source technology and web standards. There were divergent opinions about whether, for example, blogging software should be open source or proprietary. Radio UserLand was owned by a small startup, Blogger was now run by Google, and MovableType's owners Six Apart were becoming more commercial.
But there were open source alternatives — notably, the WordPress project formed in January 2003, as a fork of an existing open source project called b2, and was launched in May.
One of the things my community talked about a lot was RSS (Really Simple Syndication), then an emerging web standard. RSS meant that my blog, Read/WriteWeb, was being syndicated to other people via my RSS feed, which could be read in any number of RSS readers — also called “news aggregators.”
As I mentioned, Radio UserLand had an RSS reader in its desktop app. But there were several other options available, such as FeedDemon and NetNewsWire (both desktop readers, for Windows and Mac respectively). In mid-2003, a browser-based RSS Reader called Bloglines launched; by August I was a Bloglines user and have used browser-based readers ever since.
RSS syndication would become a crucial part of the blogging movement, because it enabled bloggers like me to be discovered and our content to be distributed across the internet. But in 2003, RSS was far from being a settled technology — it was an open standard that hadn’t yet worked out all the kinks. As noted in previous posts, there were multiple versions of RSS floating around at this point. The most popular in 2003 was RSS 2.0, created and run by Dave Winer, the proprietor of UserLand Software.
Partly in an effort to remove control of RSS from a single person or company, a community effort to create yet another RSS version began. The group behind this took a while to settle on a name; in August 2003, Tim Bray referred to it as "PEAW (Pie / Echo / Atom / Whatever)." But by December, Atom was the agreed name, and the 0.3 version had attracted support from the blogging ecosystem — most notably Google's Blogger.
Blogging Wars
Just like on social media a decade later, the early blogosphere wasn’t immune to the dark side of online discussions — arguments and public sniping.
On May 24, 2003, there was a post on Dave Winer’s weblog, Scripting News, that caught my eye. It was a link to an essay he’d written, entitled “Who will pay for software?” As a software developer, Winer was naturally concerned about his ability to earn a living from his work. “For the last few weeks I've been asking anyone who will listen if it isn't weird that our economy is based on software, more and more, yet users don't want to pay for software,” he wrote. He compared this situation to the music industry, where “songs travel freely over the Internet.”
At the time, Winer was also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. On May 29, he delivered a keynote at the third annual Open Source Content Management Conference (OSCOM), hosted by the Berkman Center. He began by pushing back against the framing of companies like UserLand Software as “proprietary” or “closed.” He preferred the term “commercial software,” and added that “all the noise that people make about open source” had been “really destructive” to companies like his.
Winer told the OSCOM audience that he wanted his keynote to be more like a “live blog,” so he invited people to interrupt him. The keynote accordingly turned into a relatively open discussion, although Winer directed it from the front of the room. One of the audience members to stick their hand up was Aaron Swartz, a 16-year old computer prodigy who had helped establish the Creative Commons (non-copyright licenses for the internet) and had also been involved in RSS standards work. “So the important thing, I think, is that you should be able to fix bugs when the developer goes bankrupt,” Swartz said, referring to one of the key benefits of open source.
Meanwhile, in the IRC backchannel, Swartz was doing an actual live blog of Winer’s session. According to his real-time notes, which were later published as a blog post, the OSCOM discussion got testy when one audience member said that Radio UserLand had “a support issue” and a “documentation issue.” Winer retorted that “there’s no damn money in software.” Soon after, there was a verbal confrontation between Winer and an audience member, Bill Kearney from the syndication startup Syndic8.com. This part of the keynote was cut out of the video that years later was published on YouTube, but Swartz live-blogged the carnage:
<AaronSw> Bill: saber-rattling. platitudes. democracy. benevolent dictatorship. guise.
DW: stop
<Mutiny> haha
<AaronSw> DW: had i known you were in the audience i would have said this
<Mutiny> damn i wish i was there.
<AaronSw> DW: I want to say this face-to-face: i don't like where you're going, i don't want to hear those thoughts
<sandro> damn i wish i was there. :-)
<AaronSw> DW: say them on your weblog. i don't want to go there
<Mutiny> this is getting juicy ahaha
The IRC user named “Mutiny” was clearly enjoying this feisty exchange, but like many online arguments before and since, the debate wasn’t productive. Whether it was open source vs. proprietary technology, RSS 2.0 vs. Atom, or any number of other geeky disagreements, in 2003 they often played out in public via blogging and the comments sections of popular blogs. Which meant it was even easier than before to amplify arguments — an early indicator of what was to come in later years with social media.
Yet We Had it So Good
Online battles aside, the tools of blogging and the burgeoning open standards that supported them (especially RSS and Atom) were truly revolutionary. The web was becoming more and more of a social platform, in no small part thanks to the participants of the early tech blogosphere.
Was 2003 the start of a truly two-way web, where users could just as easily write to the web as read it? I think it was! So it's an appropriate place to end this series on the history of blogging and RSS. If you have comments, well this isn't a blog...but you can tag me on the fediverse — the closest thing we have today to the blogosphere of 2003.
The history of blogging and RSS series:
- 1999: Blogs Burst Onto the Scene, but RSS Is Slow To Settle
- 2000: Bloggers Make Friends, but RSS Format Wars Kick Off
- 2001: Blogging Gets Serious With Warblogs and Movable Type
- 2002: The Blogosphere Takes Shape, Along With RSS 2.0
- 2003: The Blogosphere Blossoms As RSS Readers Catch On
Buy the Book
My Web 2.0 memoir, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, is now available to purchase:
- Paperback, US$19.99: Amazon; Bookshop.org
- eBook, US$9.99: Amazon Kindle Store; Apple Books; Google Play
Or search for "Bubble Blog MacManus" on your local online bookstore.