My History of Blogging

1976 Snail Mail

My friend Kevin moved away and we wrote funny letters to each other constantly. This was my first attempt at “blogging.” Readership: 1.

1978-1978 Letters from Finland

In August of 1978 I left home to spend a year in Finland. There was no email or Internet back then, so again, I relied on my snail mail connection to my friends back home, and my new found exchange student friends all over Finland. I received over 500 letters during my stay, and I probably wrote 600. Readership: 25 family and friends

1986 to 1994 The Desktop Publishing Years

In 1986 I went to work for a company called Frame Technology. Their main product was a desktop publishing tool called FrameMaker. It was the first WYSIWYG desktop publishing tool I had ever used. It could do column layout, rotated headings (if you knew PostScript), and could import graphics! I was in heaven. I immediately started using the product to create my own newsletter and send it out to family and friends. Readership: 45 family and friends.

1994 I See the Light

In 1994 my friend Chuck sent me a link to a website called “Alex the Girl.” I clicked on the link and found a very simple website where a woman named Alex would post her photographs and her musings about life.

“Chuck,” I said. “This is what I’ve been looking for! This is what I want. How do I make a website like this?”

At the time there were no websites like Blogger, MySpace, or anything of the sort. If you wanted to blog you had to create your own website from scratch. I didn’t have the expertise to create my own “Kelly the Girl” website, so I continued to send my family and friends quarterly newsletters through the snail mail.

2003 Blogging Goes Mainstream

In 2003 a friend of mine sent me a Beta invitation to one of the first blogging websites called Yahoo! 360°. It was kind of crude, and didn’t have many users, but I started posting anyway. My first blogs were posted from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Readership: Probably 15 people

2005 Kelly Discovers MySpace

In 2005 my friend Brandon told me about this cool new website called MySpace. He was using it to promote his films and music, and said I should create a page so I could network too. I created my first blog on MySpace on August 1, 2005. It was entitled “Sunday filming.” Readership: 0. My second blog was called “Asses and Crotches,” and was posted on August 2, 2005. Readership: 1 (a guy named JL).

My readership did not really take off until six months later when Margie Boulé, a columnist for the Oregonian, published a story about my blog.

MySpace was the perfect platform for me. There were about 20 million users when I started, and has now flattened out at about 125 million users. That’s a lot of bloggers and blog readers! But with growth come growing pains, and MySpace has certainly had them.

Stay tuned for my “Dear MySpace” letter…