Blogdex, a system launched in 2001 to track weblogs.

At the beginning of 2001, most popular weblogs were a combination of personal journal and linkblog — a format encouraged by early blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal and Diaryland. But by the end of the year, blogging had become a real-time reporting tool too; most notably in the form of the “warblogs” that became popular after 9/11, like Talking Points Memo, Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish. The October launch of Movable Type was also a key moment in the professionalisation of blogging.

But let's start in January 2001, with the first annual Weblog Awards. This was a hobby site run by Nikolai Nolan, a University of Michigan student, who defined a weblog as “a page with dated entries that frequently have off-site links.” The "bloggies" never gained the prominence of the Webby Awards, which it was clearly a clone of; nevertheless, it serves as a good indication of where the nascent blog ecosystem was at to begin the year.

Weblog Awards 2001 results; via Wayback Machine.

The overall winner was /Usr/Bin/Girl, a Blogger site run by a Seattle web designer named Zannah. It was primarily a linkblog, with an informal, chatty style of commentary.

/Usr/Bin/Girl in January 2001.

Zannah had a charming mix of geekiness and esoteric interests; a common feature of pre-2001 blogging (you could say the same thing about Jason Kottke). Her online persona was somewhat mysterious, but also not contained to one place on the web — she had multiple other websites. Here's how she later described her two main blogs:

"The name "#!/usr/bin/girl" is (among quite a number of other things) a play on the first line of a perl script: #!/usr/bin/perl. The #! really are part of the string and the name. There's not much in the way of meta talk here; the primary goal of this site is to provide a collection of interesting links to distract you. If you're looking for something more chatty, check out vox.machina."

Zannah's online presence circa March 2001.

This geeky, linky, web-exploring style of blogging would continue to expand in the following years (I started blogging in 2002 by adopting this format). But as 2001 unfolded, other types of blogging took hold — this time attracting mainstream audiences.

Political Blogs

Over 2001, political pundits began flocking to blogs. The disputed U.S. election of late 2000 had sparked the first wave, with Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo launching in November 2000. As Marshall himself admitted on the site's 15th anniversary, his blog immediately took the form of partisan journalism:

"Early years saw an aggressive focus on foreign policy, the Trent Lott meltdown, yes, the Gary Condit scandal, endless numbers of posts about voter suppression, election campaigns, the Iraq War and always, always political scandals."

A former journalist, the liberal-leaning Marshall used his blog to critique the Bush administration and unpack Washington scandals — an early example of using blogs as a tool for investigative writing rather than mere opinion.

Talking Points Memo, November 2000.

But then, in September 2001, everything changed. The shift was starkly illustrated on TPM. On Sept. 10, Marshall had written about "some news that should buoy Democrats and send a chill through Republicans' spines" (he was referring to a proposed tax cut). But the following day, Marshall suddenly had more important things to comment on:

"TPM, of course, is normally all about arguments among us, among Americans. But all of that falls deep into the background now. And my support, and I'm sure yours too, is with our president, our armed services, and all of those struggling mightily to save those who can still be saved."

The terrorist attacks of September 11 quickly turned blogging into a real-time forum for political analysis, conspiracy theories, emotion and outrage. The so-called “warblogs” emerged.

Glenn Reynolds was a libertarian-conservative law professor at the University of Tennessee who had started Instapundit in August 2001. Within a month of his blog's launch, he went from mild posts about Democrats missing Bill Clinton to repeated posts about war. After 9/11, Instapundit became emblematic of the “warblog” genre — fast, reactive, and unapologetically political.

Instapundit, 18 September 2001.

Andrew Sullivan, a British-American commentator, had launched The Daily Dish on his personal site in October 2000. Over 2001, it became one of the most widely read blogs on the web. Sullivan wrote prolifically in the days following 9/11, mixing emotional responses with policy commentary — including attempts to blame the previous Clinton administration for 9/11 (see the screenshot below).

Sullivan's near-constant updates helped popularize the idea of blogging as instant punditry — analysis that often appeared minutes after events unfolded.

The Daily Dish, 17 September 2009.

By the end of 2001, the words “blog” and “blogger” had become synonymous with the daily roil of political journalism; and many early bloggers resented this. On reviewing Scott Rosenberg's 2009 book about blogging, Say Everything, RSS 1.0 co-creator Rael Dornfest commented:

"Scott discusses the influx of “warbloggers” immediately after September 11, 2001. Reading that part of the book made me really sad, so much so that I almost wanted to put the book down. I felt like those people took something from the people who were blogging before, and I still resent them for it."

Movable Type

Blogging had emerged over 1999 and 2000 in large part thanks to Blogger, which made publishing to the web a one-click operation. But in October, the first professional blogging tool debuted: Movable Type. Created by Ben and Mena Trott, it was a revelation for bloggers who wanted more control over their sites. MT supported multiple blogs from one installation, allowed full template customization, and generated static HTML pages — improving both speed and reliability. Crucially, it also supported RSS feeds out of the box (even by the end of 2001, RSS wasn't a default feature in Blogger).

Movable Type, 9 September 2001.

Mena Trott, one half of the husband and wife team, told Giles Turnbull from writetheweb.com that she'd previously been a Blogger user:

"I've been using Blogger since I began weblogging earlier this year. MT can't replace Blogger; we don't want it to. There are clear advantages to having a web-based, centrally hosted application. I just felt I out-grew the features of Blogger and was a bit frustrated with the server downtimes and associated problems."

Aside: there was actually another open source blogging tool released during this period, called Greymatter. It had been launched by Noah Grey at the end of 2000, but by March 2001 Grey had withdrawn from the project due to health issues.

When MT launched on October 8, Metafilter co-founder Matthew Haughey commented favourably:

"I like it. It definitely benefits from the age of other blog software. I never liked the admin interfaces in greymatter, and MT certainly presents a nice clean, task-driven interface to working with your blogs."

During the final few months of 2001, journalists, academics and web designers began adopting Movable Type. It quickly became the platform of choice for serious bloggers, setting the standard for blogging software at least until WordPress arrived in 2003.

Dinah Sanders' MetaGrrrl site was among those to migrate from Blogger to MovableType (this screenshot is from February 2002, but she had made the move before the end of 2001).

RSS and Feeds in 2001

When we left RSS development in the previous post, the RSS-DEV group had launched RSS 1.0 in early December 2000, quickly followed by Dave Winer publishing RSS 0.92 as a competing format. When Movable Type launched in October 2001, it initially supported RSS version 0.91 — the version developed by Netscape but which Winer was now claiming ownership of. MT went on to add an RSS 1.0 template, so that users could choose which format they wanted.

As John Gruber later noted, it turned out that Movable Type’s default RSS 0.91 template did not produce valid RSS. But that has more to say about the state of RSS development in late-2001; a confusing period for blog software makers and bloggers alike, since there was not one settled version of RSS.

The RSS syndication options of Lawrence Lee's blog, Tomalak's Realm, early August 2001. The site was published using Dave Winer's Frontier CMS.

Despite the messiness of competing RSS formats, by 2001 there were commercial companies with successful web syndication products. The most notable was Moreover, a London-based news aggregator founded by Nick Denton, David Galbraith, and Angus Bankes. Moreover had sided with the RSS 1.0 camp and was calling itself “the webfeed company.” Its technology powered real-time news widgets on portals like AltaVista and Yahoo! — and when the 9/11 attacks happened, those feeds became the fastest way for people to get breaking updates online.

Moreover's homepage just after 9/11; via Wayback Machine.

By late 2001, RSS was spreading across the web, in particular via tech-focused blogs like Boing Boing and DiveIntoMark. That said, there were still plenty of other tech blogs that didn't yet have feeds — like Kottke.org and Tom Coates' PlasticBag. So RSS was still not quite "widely distributed," to use the old William Gibson quote.

Real-Time Infrastructure

Alongside RSS came new experiments in blog infrastructure. In July 2001, MIT researcher Cameron Marlow launched Blogdex, a tool that tracked the most-linked URLs across thousands of weblogs.

Bloddex, 30 November 2001; via Wayback Machine.

On the information page for BlogDex, you could sense the shift in how blogs had become a more journalistic tool over 2001 — "democratic media" — albeit one still rooted in the personal:

"'Weblogs' are a relatively new method of distributing personal news, essentially an individual's log of activities, news, and thoughts presented in a public manner on the web. As a publishing medium, weblogs are ultimately democratic, often as timely as traditional news sources, and have a potential distribution much greater than print media. One problem with these personal information sources is the inability to find an audience. Blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses."

Among the most intriguing features of Blogdex was wrapping an individual blog with a Blogdex "social network explorer" footer. The screenshot below shows Blogger founder Ev Williams' blog, but on a Blogdex URL:

Evhead on Blogdex, December 2001.

Also, in October 2001, Dave Winer relaunched Weblogs.com as a “ping server.” Instead of waiting for crawlers to detect updates, blogs could now send an XML-RPC ping every time they published a new post. The site displayed a constantly refreshing “recently updated” list.

The arrival of services like Blogdex and Weblogs.com helped turn blogging into a fully networked ecosystem. Whether or not you liked the new "warblogs," you at least had a real-time way to track which blogs were being updated and who they were connected to.

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The history of blogging and RSS series:

1. 1999: Blogs Burst Onto the Scene, but RSS Is Slow To Settle
2. 2000: Bloggers Make Friends, but RSS Format Wars Kick Off
3. 2001: Blogging Gets Serious With Warblogs and Movable Type

Stay tuned for the next post covering 2002 in blogging and RSS, featuring the emergence of RSS Readers, Technorati and Google News. Also, my own debut as a blogger! Subscribe to be notified.