The Blogosphere Blossoms in 2003 As RSS Readers Catch On

The Blogosphere Blossoms in 2003 As RSS Readers Catch On In 2003, the read/write web becomes a reality when blog software enables anyone to write to the web. Meanwhile, RSS Readers like NetNewsWire and Bloglines bring distribution to the blogosphere. The release of NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003, one of the first popular RSS Readers. So far in my history of blogging and RSS, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs," and then became an interconnected ecosystem called the blogosphere in 2002 . In 2003, blogging continued its evolution into a new form of media publication - helped greatly by the rapid adoption of RSS Readers. In April 2003, I started a new technology blog called Read/WriteWeb (which I soon began abbreviating to RWW). While I'd experimented with blogging the previous year, my first effort - a linkblog called Modern Web - didn't stick. This time I was determined to write original posts and to regularly update RWW. I thought having a distinct topic focus would help, so I decided to write about blogging, RSS, and all the new web technologies starting to make waves at that time. ReadWriteWeb homepage, 5 June 2003 (the earliest Wayback Machine copy). My first post (which I've since replanted on Cybercultural ) explained what I meant by a “read/write web”: “The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it. The web was never just supposed to be a one-way publishing system, but the first decade of the web has been dominated by a tool which has been read-only - the web browser. The goal now is to convert the web into a two-way system. Ordinary people should be able to write to the web, just as easily as they can browse and read it.” Before blogging took off in the early 2000s, creating an online publication required a level of technical nous that most people didn’t have. Since I was a web geek and managed websites in my day job (in 2003, I worked for a New Zealand power company), I did actually have that technical ability. But I was in a minority and I could see in 2003 that blogging was a game-changer for web publishing - anyone could now do it! As I put it in that debut RWW post: “Products like Radio Userland, Movable Type and Blogger help people set up a web presence by giving them templates to enter their content into and a simple ‘point and click’ method of publishing it. With weblogs, ordinary people now have the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and opinions to the World Wide Web, in conjunction with browsing the web. We are approaching a read/write web.” I used Radio Userland when I started RWW, but the following year I switched to Movable Type...

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