1999: Blogs Burst Onto the Scene, but RSS Is Slow To Settle
Cybercultural: Internet History 2025-10-06
Blogger, soon after its launch in August 1999.
On January 26, 1999, Cameron Barrett — who ran a website called Camworld — pondered the meaning of a new term he’d recently discovered:
“A few months back, I heard the term weblog for the first time. I'm not sure who coined it or where it came from, so I can't properly credit it. Typically, a weblog is a small web site, usually maintained by one person that is updated on a regular basis and has a high concentration of repeat visitors. Weblogs often are highly focused around a singular subject, an underlying theme or unifying concept.”
Camworld 'anatomy of a weblog' post, January 26, 1999 (screenshot April 1999).
Thus began a multi-year process of people trying to define what a weblog is. One of the better efforts was Rebecca Blood’s article, Weblogs: A History and Perspective, published in September 2000 — when the birth of blogging in 1999 was still fresh in her mind. She noted that in 1998, there were “just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs.”
By the start of 1999, her friend Jesse James Garrett’s "page of only weblogs" was listing out “the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999.” Also in early 1999, Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of weblogs and called it the Eatonweb Portal. According to Blood, Eaton “evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries.”
Crucially, at this point weblogs tended to be run by people who knew how to wrangle code. As Blood put it:
"The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website."
Blood started her own weblog in April 1999; and it was shortly after that the word “blog” was coined. Sometime in late April or early May, San Francisco web designer Peter Merholz added a note to his sidebar:
“I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee'- blog. Or "blog" for short.”
A screenshot of Peter Merholz's site on 28 April 1999 (before he'd added the blog definition).
Around the same time, Jorn Barger — another early weblogger with his site Robot Wisdom — was pondering the utility of the format. On May 5, 1999, he wrote in a "meta" note:
"My ideal for weblogs is that everybody should keep one-- publicly or privately-- as the most efficient way of archiving good bookmarks. (Since I started keeping mine, I've hardly ever lost an URL!) If this means you copy 90% of my links, I don't mind at all if you also: 1) write your own comments rather than copying mine, and 2) include a link to me from time to time that will let your readers choose whether they want to follow RWWL here, directly."
Again, the focus is on links and a dash of commentary — but there are hints that weblogs can also help form communities. By linking to him, Barger suggests, you might share readers.
In the following paragraph, Barger uses the term "loggers"; so at this point there is no set term for people who run a weblog.
Later that month, an article in Salon blew open the doors for blogging. On May 28, 1999, Scott Rosenberg wrote that “a phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today.” He then offered a detailed definition, emphasizing dated entries and multiple links:
“Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom.”
According to Rosenberg, a weblog wasn’t just a straight “linkalist” (a term that one of his journalist colleagues derisively used) and it was also different from the often painfully raw online journals that people like Justin Hall ran. A weblog was more like an ongoing record of personal discovery on the web. Or as Rosenberg nicely put it, “a good weblog is also a window onto the mind and daily life of its creator.”
Salon's article on weblogs on May 28, 1999.
One of the early bloggers Rosenberg pointed to was Dave Winer, who not only ran his own weblog — Scripting News, started in 1997 — but was a developer of web publishing software. In his post commenting on the Salon piece, Winer pointed out that weblogs made it easier for people to publish to the web:
“The web is maturing and growing. It's becoming easier to create websites. As time goes by it will become much easier.”
Blogger Launches
By now, there were web publishing products that made it relatively simple to start a weblog. Winer’s was called Frontier (which soon spawned Radio UserLand, which would become my first blogging tool). But in the second half of 1999, it was a new product called Blogger that brought this activity to the mainstream web.
Pyra Labs, a company co-founded by twenty-something entrepreneurs Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, launched Blogger on August 23, 1999.
Pyra's website on October 12, 1999, less than two months after the launch of Blogger.
Hourihan later confirmed that the name 'Blogger' derived from Merholz:
"The use of "blog" came from Peter. We were friends with him in San Francisco and so know about his joke to change the pronunciation of "weblog." At the time everyone said "weblog" and "weblogger" so picking up his pronounciation, Evan Williams came up with the name "Blogger" for our product."
By early November, Blogger had added a "Blog this!" bookmarklet for IE browsers on Windows.
The key to Blogger's success was that users needed no technical knowledge — all you had to do was fill in a form on the Blogger website ("No muss. No fuss."). Specifically, you didn't have to mess around with web servers. Behind the scenes, Blogger used FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to publish the contents of the form to the user's weblog.
Subscribing to Blogs via RSS
One thing early Blogger users didn't have was an RSS feed. On December 21st, Blogger developer Paul Bausch suggested a manual approach. "Blogger doesn't have automatic RSS file generation yet," he wrote, "but you can still use Blogger to easily maintain an RSS file."
Bausch linked to a separate post demonstrating the method. But since it required users to mess with template code, it wasn't very user friendly and didn't seem to fit the 'no muss, no fuss' ethos of Blogger.
Paul Bausch demonstrating how to create an RSS feed, using his own blog at onfocus.com.
A few days later, Ev Williams proudly announced that the company had created an RSS feed for "the 10 most recently updated Blogger-powered blogs." He noted that they were registering the feed "as a channel on My.Netscape.Com and My.Userland.Com (as soon as we figure out the error there)."
Part of the reason for the error was because web syndication formats were still new — and the protocol far from settled.
Netscape had launched the first RSS specification on March 15, 1999: RSS 0.90, which stood for "RDF Site Summary." The company recommended using the .rdf suffix, although this wasn't a strict requirement. RSS 0.90 was a way for publishers to add their website as a "channel" to My.Netscape.com, a new customizable version of Netcenter (Netscape's portal).
Elements of an RSS 0.90 feed, via Netscape.
The most notable thing about RSS 0.90, from an historical perspective, is that it was designed to list out linked item titles only — since that was how portals worked at the time.
Dave Winer had been experimenting with creating XML files as a way to syndicate content since December 1997. But he hadn't specced it out yet, so in February 1999 he was curious to test out Netscape's new syndication format.
Dave Winer testing RSS 0.90 in Netcenter in February 1999.
In March, he started a new syndication server (My.UserLand.Com) that followed Netscape's specification. By early June, things seemed to be going well:
"Along with Netscape's My.Netscape.Com, we are operating compatible servers that support a new web content syndication format called RSS. Our servers have been operating for three months, aggregating popular news channels and weblogs to each of our respective audiences."
But just twelve days later, Winer claimed there was "a format split". He now said that Netscape's version of RSS was "woefully inadequate."
Start of the RSS Format Wars
The primary bone of contention was that Winer wanted to syndicate much more of his content than the Netscape RSS format allowed. As he put it:
"A channel is not a series of links pointing to articles, it's a set of paragraphs that point to one or more articles per paragraph. We told Netscape this, and they said they would work with us on the next rev of the spec."
At this point, Winer wasn't calling his version "RSS" — he called it the <scriptingNews> format.
Winer demonstrated the difference in formats by showing two screenshots: Netscape's "skinny" RSS with just headline links, and his "fat" syndication format with expanded content.
Netscape's "skinny" RSS on the left, Winer's "fat" format on the right.
Netscape listened to Winer's concerns, and in July Dan Libby produced a new version called RSS 0.91. This version removed the RDF elements, made it "100% XML valid," and "included several tags from the popular <scriptingNews> format." Libby also re-parsed the acronym to mean "Rich Site Summary."
There were character limits on the new tags and My Netscape continued to only use item headings, but RSS 0.91 was a concession that other syndication hubs — like Winer's — wanted more content.
Example RSS 0.91 code; note the <description> tag within <item>, directly inspired by Winer, which allowed up to 500 characters.
In Winer's view, RSS 0.91 was still too limited. As he put it later:
"In RSS 0.91 various elements are restricted to 500 or 100 characters. There can be no more than 15 <items> in a 0.91 <channel>."
In retrospect, Winer's position was entirely correct: there was no technical reason why web syndication feeds shouldn't be full-text. But perhaps because it was tied to its portal strategy at this time, Netscape wasn't inclined to make RSS a first-class citizen of the web.
Netscape seemed to lose interest in RSS after this (the company had been acquired by AOL at the end of 1998, so things were in flux). So Winer continued to build up his own syndication format, which by the end of 1999 was called <scriptingNews> 2.0b1.
Conclusion
Needless to say, the RSS format wars were far from over — this was just the beginning, in fact. But the unsettled nature of the formats in the second half of 1999 probably explains why Blogger didn't provide RSS feeds to its users.
By the end of 1999, then, blogging was off to the races and fast becoming a mainstream web activity. RSS was slow out of the gates in comparison, but at least it had made a start.
Next in this series: 2000: Bloggers Make Friends, but RSS Format Wars Kick Off