How the Blogosphere Takes Shape in 2002, Along With RSS 2.0
The blogosphere becomes a trend in 2002 — a growing ecosystem of weblogs interconnecting via feeds, comments and a new feature called trackback. We also see the debut of RSS 2.0 and Technorati.
In my history of blogging so far, 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, and then turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs." During those early years of the form, I was aware of certain weblogs but I hadn't yet signed up for an account at Blogger or downloaded Movable Type. In other words, I was a reader of blogs — but not yet a writer. That changed in March 2002, when I paid for an annual license to a desktop blogging tool called Radio Userland.
I called my new weblog Modern Web. My initial goal was to blog about "web development and e-business trends." At the time, I worked for a New Zealand power company as a "Web Manager" — I was in charge of the company website and intranet. So my intention was to use my weblog to track the latest web trends, which might then help me in my job. What I discovered, slowly and over time, was a community of people that were passionate about the same things I was. I didn't immediately find my blogging voice (that was in April 2003, when I started a new blog called ReadWriteWeb), but I felt like I was a part of something: the "blogosphere," as it would later be termed.
The beauty of Radio Userland was that it wasn't just a blog authoring tool, but an RSS aggregator too — you could both write a blog and read other blogs. The creator of Radio Userland was Dave Winer, whose blog Scripting News I read on a regular basis (which was how I discovered Radio). I was also a fan of a New Zealand tech news column called Aardvark, which didn't call itself a blog but was updated every day and had an RSS feed. Before I downloaded Radio, I had simply visited the homepages of those sites in my browser every day — perhaps while I was drinking coffee at my cubicle after I'd arrived at work, or during snatches of downtime during my work day, or in the evenings at home on my desktop computer. So being able to track RSS feeds in Radio Userland — where new posts came to me, rather than me seeking them out every day — was a revelation.
Daypop and Technorati
While I was making my first tentative steps in the blogosphere, the ecosystem was starting to become better organized. Daypop had launched in 2001 and described itself as "a current events search engine." By February 2002, it was indexing "over 6300 of the best news sites and weblogs on the net every day." By the end of the year, it had risen to 7,500 sources.
What seemed to most appeal to bloggers was its list of top 40 links in the weblogging community. But because Daypop was a one-person operation — the site was created and run by Daniel Chan, a Los Angeles programmer — the site sometimes had technical issues. In September Daypop reported that it was "out of disk space", which led to a bemused Wired article. But Wired also noted the site's additive quality:
"It's like the front page of the Internet," said one participant at last week's Burning Man festival, who borrowed a wireless laptop to check Daypop from the middle of the Nevada desert in 100-degree heat. "They've made it so easy."
In addition to Daypop, the MIT project Blogdex (which I profiled in the 2001 post) continued to evolve, including with a redesign in November 2002. But both Daypop and Blogdex would eventually be usurped as a blog popularity index by Technorati, founded by Dave Sifry at the end of 2002. At first, Technorati's main feature was called Cosmos:
"Cosmos allows you to find what's new in the blogging universe, and find out who's linking to whom. Simply type in a URL of a blog, website, or interesting article on the web, and Cosmos will tell you which bloggers are linking to the URL."
It wasn't until 2004 that Technorati dropped the Cosmos branding and became the brand that in many ways defined the Web 2.0 era from a blog indexing perspective.
Another indexing project from 2002 worth a mention is Google News, which Google quietly released in early 2002. The New York Times reported on it in September, but there was no mention of blogs. In later years, Google News would start to index blog content — but in 2002 blogs weren't widely regarded as journalism.
The State of RSS in 2002
After the forking of RSS in 2000, the format wars continued into 2002 without really making any progress. Then on 6 September 2002, Dave Winer indicated he would be making a significant change to his version of RSS: he would promote his draft RSS 0.94 to a new “RSS 2.0” and add a formal extension mechanism using XML namespaces. Around the same time, he also suggested a backronym for RSS: "Really Simple Syndication."
Namespaces were a big deal in RSS 2.0 because they allowed extension modules, letting web publishers add new elements (for things like richer content, licensing, and later podcasting-style metadata) without breaking feed compatibility. To some observers, this seemed to narrow at least one technical gap between RSS 0.9x and the RDF-based RSS 1.0, which had used namespaces extensively from the start.
By the end of September, Mark Pilgrim had created a new RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type and a sample feed that used well-known RSS 1.0 modules, such as Dublin Core (dc:), Content (content:), and Admin (admin:). He added this comment about namespaces:
"Now, the RSS 2.0 specification says nothing about how to actually use namespaces in RSS, just that you’re allowed to. So where did these particular namespaces come from? Well, I didn’t make them up. They have been developed over the past two years by some smart people, most of whom hang out on the RSS-DEV mailing list. The namespaces were originally developed for RSS 1.0, and most of them can be used without modification in RSS 2.0."
Despite the apparent détente, this wouldn't be the end of the RSS format wars — as Pilgrim hinted, there was still a lot to sort out in terms of how to implement namespaces consistently across all the variants. But by the end of 2002, the momentum for general-purpose syndication was clearly with RSS 2.0. In a post on XML.com at the end of 2002, Pilgrim documented the state of play in this diagram:
Trackback and Pingback
While the RSS arguments bubbled away, in June Movable Type bloggers received a more straight-forward upgrade: trackback. The idea was to send a "ping" to another blog telling them you've linked to them, and have that ping show up on their blog — just like a comment. One blogger of the time called it "blog tennis."
The documentation described it as "peer-to-peer communication and conversations between blogs." On its first implementation, trackback was a pop-up box that opened when you clicked the "trackback" link — as per Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott's blog post below.
Soon, the idea was extended by other bloggers. Ian Hickson, a prominent W3C contributer at the time, wrote a spec for "Pingback," based on ideas formed by Stuart Langridge and Simon Willison. As Hickson laid out in a post, the goal was to automate the trackback process and also make it "software-agnostic, so any Web logging system can implement pingback and interoperate with all other pingback-enabled Web logs."
The Blogosphere
By the end of 2002, blogging had blossomed into a thriving ecosystem of colourful personal sites that interconnected to each other via RSS, trackback and blogrolls.
Blogging software by this time was both sophisticated and relatively easy to use. In its version 2.51, as well as trackback Movable Type had multiple template options, entry categorization, built-in comments, and more. The original mainstream blog platform, Blogger, was also still going strong — indeed it would soon be acquired by Google, in February 2003. Other blog software options included Radio Userland (which I would soon dive into again), LiveJournal and Xanga.
In some ways, 2002 was the peak of desktop-PC blog design. Many blogs of this time had a narrow main column of text and a sidebar stuffed with a blogroll, RSS links, photos, biographical information, and more. It was personal expression meets online community — a.k.a. "the blogosphere."
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
Stay tuned for the next post covering 2003 in blogging and RSS, featuring the emergence of RSS Readers and the continuing expansion of the blogosphere. Subscribe to be notified.
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