As we all know, every blog has a beginning. The beauty of the web is that websites can be stored in a permanent cache; effectively taking a virtual snapshot of the way the blog exists at that moment in time and storing it for later retrieval. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could go back in time and see what certain blogs looked like then? Well, it turns out you can. Archive.org has a public cache that stores snapshots of websites at regular intervals. It is called the Wayback Machine, and works just like a regular search engine; I tapped into it to bring you some blog history. You punch in the URL of the blog/site you want to look up, and they show you what dates they have stored in their database. The tool is not flawless, and many searches turn up corrupted pages or missing images, but it is really cool nonetheless.   I did quite a bit of poking around on the database, and here are some of the snapshots I found:

The Blogs I Looked Up

From left to right, down the list in order, the blogs covered were Blog Herald, Boing Boing, Copyblogger, Engadget, John Chow, and Problogger. The thumbnails are in sequential order, so that you see the earliest snapshot of the blog to the most recent. To view each snapshot, just click on the thumbnail to load the full-size version of it. If you roll the mouse over each thumbnail, it will tell you what blog the snapshot is from and which date as well. This project was a lot of fun, and I could have gone on forever with it.

One thing that we can all take away from this example is the amazing amount of hard work and dedication the owners of these blogs have committed to their sites. We sometimes forget that everyone has a starting point, and everyone at one time was a nobody. Even Google. Now, I am gonna bet that after you read this post, you are going to head over to the Wayback Machine and start looking up all kinds of sites! Go for it.

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What separates a blog and a forum? It’s not as simple of an answer as it was just a few years ago.

Forums have long been making use of RSS feeds and some have even adopted more blog-like layouts. Now many forum applications have begun sending pingbacks and trackbacks to articles linked in posts, an activity that began and, previously was limited to, blogs.

However, blogs have also begun to become more and more forum-like. Though comments have always been a major part of blogging, many are also encouraging original submissions. They are also placing a heavier emphasis on comments and services such as Disqus and Intense Debate provide greater commenter identity and cross-site accounts.

In short, where forums have been pulling from the playbook of blogs in their newest features, blogs have been gradually becoming more community-oriented, turning away from the author-oriented approach they are often associated with.

This has had the effect of blurring the lines between the two and confusing many who are building new sites.

To help make sense of it, I decided to turn to my long-time friend, podcast co-host and all-around community expert Patrick O’Keefe in hopes he could provide some insights into their similarities and differences as well as help sites decide which format is right for them. read more

WordPress.com’s free blog hosting site has just rolled out geotagging of posts. This opt-in feature allows you to identify your location whenever you write a post.

Enabling this feature your blogs can be done either automatically by WordPress.com or you can set it manually yourself. read more

Blogging is like any other business or activity, if you stay with it long enough, eventually things will begin to change for you. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve likely already noticed that you don’t run your site the same way now that you did when you began. Likewise, if you just began, you’re probably already thinking of ways that you can improve or expand.

Your blog, nor you as a blogger, stay the same from month to month, year to year. Things change and, for the most part, it’s best to work with the tides rather than fight them. The change is rarely for the worst and, for the most part, it is inevitable.

Here are five areas that, over, the years I’ve been blogging, changed drastically for me. None are bad things. Some of these are signs of growth, some are signs of simply getting older as a blog/blogger. Either way, they are changes most bloggers can expect to face if they stick with it long enough. read more

In what may mark the beginnings of a turn of fortune, Shiny Media has announced that three sidelined blogs have been relaunched.

Who Ate All The Pies stopped being updated in September last year, but now Ollie Irish has retaken his role as editor-in-chief, with Anorak handling content production but (at present) with the blog still very clearly branded as Shiny Media’s. Details of the deal aren’t known (and probably won’t be made public) but I’d imagine some sort of revenue sharing and pay-per-post deal is in place to keep both the writers and companies happy. read more

Matt Mullenweg has announced that Automattic will be giving blo.gs, a ping service of yore, a refresh:

Yahoo! is transferring blo.gs to Automattic for safekeeping and further development. I’ve been a long-time fan of the service, and it even inspired the early WordPress feature which reordered your blogroll based on update times.

Classy move on Yahoo’s part, who obviously have no use for it.

Mummy blogging is taking off in a big way in the UK, with an estimated 175,000 new blogs expected to be launched this Mother’s Day (22nd March) and with 55% being written by women.

By way of encouragement for both the parents who blog, and those who want to discover them, Talking Tots has published its first “Tots100″ index of the best parenting blogs in Britain. read more

I have sold my fair share of blogs, although I’m most definitely not among the worst blog hustlers out there. Every time I have indeed decided to part with a blog, or any other website for that matter, I’ve done what I could to find a good buyer. Not all manage to do so, blinded by the hopes and dreams of the buyer, or just by the wad of dollar bills offered. There’s a really nice post on that up on Webmaster Source, which comes down to this advice:

If you ever end up wanting to sell a well-established blog for some reason, think of your readers. Before you just sell to the highest bidder, put up a post asking if any of them would like to buy it. Someone from your community is more likely to keep it going. Shop it around to some blog networks or other bloggers on the same topic, maybe.

So true, so true. Read the whole thing here.

As far as I’m concerned, putting together a “100 best blogs” post is potentially very easy (there are hundreds of millions of them) and yet extremely difficult — how do you narrow that list down to just 100 even in one genre?

The Sunday Times is the latest one of the established media to have a go at creating a list of jumping off points. The article is definitely aimed at those for whom reading blogs is not a current pastime — feed readers and blog directories are explained in a side panel.

Here we have a handful of blogs in each category — world affairs, celebrities, style, words, original thinkers, cult, comic relief, domestic politics (UK focused) and visual aids. That’s just 50 blogs, with film, science, art, the home, theatre, pop and classical coming next week. read more

Have you ever wondered how a PR or marketing agency computes for media values within blogs? This is very different from advertising value – as there’s always a dollar price slapped on to a specific ad slot. But media value is different – as it takes into consideration other things such as how the message was communicated.

Media value is nothing more than a quantitative way to express the PR generated from your product through TV, radio, print and other below the line events. If you’re an Internet marketer or PR firm, have you developed a way to determine media values for your client? read more