The history of blog and blogging

The history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it. Before "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with "threads".

 

The world of blogging developed from online diaries, which started in 1994, just a few years after the world wide web was created. Today, a blog is created every second and at the end of last year there were over 60 million blogs worldwide.The term blog is short for 'web log', meaning a regularly updated collection of links to other sites and comments – which was originally coined by Jorn Barger in 1997. His site 'Robot Wisdom' was one of the first blogs.

In 1999 new software services like Blogger and LiveJournal launched making blogs much simpler to create.
The world of text blogs expanded to include photos, audio ('podcasting') and video blogging – sometime called vlogs.

 

Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize

PARIS — The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday that it had awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Chinese author Mo Yan, the cultural high point of a week of accolades to scientists, writers and peacemakers. 

Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the citation for the award declared.In addition to novels, Mo Yan has published short stories, essays on various topics, and “despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors.”Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Gaomi, China, and, according to the academy, is resident in China. The citation for the award described him as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the

contemporary.”The name Mo Yan is a pseudonym for Guan Moye. He is the son of farmers who left school during the Cultural Revolution to work, first in agriculture and later in a factory, according to his Nobel biography.In 1976 he joined the People’s Liberation Army and began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981, the biography on the Nobel Web site said.

“In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth,”the biography said, referring to his 1987 novel published in English as Red Sorghum in 1993. His novel The Garlic Ballads, as it was called on its publication in English in 1995, and other works “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.” 

Other works include Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996), Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (2006) and Sandalwood Death, to be published in English in 2013. His most recent published work, called Wa in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy.”