1967

• The Internet is born. It has been commercially available since 1988.

1979

• A decentralized system of discussion boards called the USENET (User Network) is created.

1994

• The online travelogue travel-library.com is launched as a community on USENET.

1996

• cyber24.com is launched by photographer Rick Smolan to promote collaborative photo blogging under a project named ‘24 hours in Cyberspace’.

1997

• John Barger, an American blogger, publishes short posts in reverse chronology calling them the ‘Robot Wisdom Weblog’ . Soon similar web pages came to be commonly known as weblogs.

1998

• Blog hosting-cum-online journal service called ‘LiveJournal’ is launched.

• ‘OpenDiary’, another online journaling tool is launched.

1999

• As a web joke, blogger Peter Merholz broke the term weblog as ‘we blog‘ in the sidebar of his blog ‘peterme.com’. The term later gave way for the new generic term Blog.

• The blog host ‘Blogger’ is launched by the Pyra Labs. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2003.
• A journal hosting tool for beginners called ‘DiaryLand’ is launched.

2001

• The advent of political blogging begins with ‘Instapundit’.
• One of the first audio blogs ‘Buzzgrinder’ is launched to enable members to upload mp3 files in to their blogs.
• The bloggies awards are initiated. The winners will be chosen by the public and blogs will be nominated in around 30 categories.

2002

• The photo blogging service ‘Picasa’ is launched by Idealab. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2004.
• One of the first blog search engines ‘Technorati’ is launched.

2003

• A travel blog called ‘BootsnAll’ is launched.
• One of the first vblogs ‘Metacafe’ is launched.

• The blog hosting-cum-social networking website ‘MySpace’ is launched.
• The photo blogging websites ‘Photobucket’ is launched. It will be taken over by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.
• One of the first open source blog hosting websites/ blog tools ‘WordPress’ is launched.

• The Weblog awards are initiated.  The winners are chosen by public votes.

2004

• The blog search engine BlogPulse is launched by ‘IntelliSeek’. It will be taken over by the Nielsen Company.
• A health based blog hosting service called ‘HealthDiaries’ is launched.

• The photo blog hosting service ‘Flickr’ is launched. It will be taken over by Yahoo! in 2005.
• The BOBs – Best of the Blogs awards are initiated. The winners are selected by an international jury of independent journalists, media experts and blog experts.

2005

• ‘Blogher’ – A women oriented blog hosting service is launched.
• One of the largest and video blogging site ‘DailyMotion’ is launched.
• Google introduces a blog search engine called ‘Google Blog Search’.
• Yahoo launches a blog hosting service – Yahoo! 360°

• One of the most popular video blogs ‘YouTube’ is launched. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2004.

2006

• One of the first micro-blogging website ‘Twitter’ is launched.
• Another micro-blogging service called ‘Jaiku’ is launched. It will be taken over by Google Inc. in 2009.

2008

• Another micro-blogging service called ‘Plurk’ is launched.

With movies and games becoming more graphically intense, the file sizes have sky-rocketed into the multiple Gigabyte (GB) range. This means of course, that if you want to have a bunch of High-Definition movies, games, etc. on your computer, you will need a lot of storage, and the good folks at Western Digital (WD) have you covered. WD’s new hard drive (HDD) has surpassed Seagate’s 1.5 Terabyte (TB = 1,024GB) and just released a 2TB HDD! Now that’s a lot of storage for one HDD! This Serial-ATA (SATA) HDD has 32MB cache, 5400 rpm, and a new feature called “Intelliseek.” (There is a great video provided by WD (linked below) so you can visualize this feature) Intelliseek is a technology that the HDD uses to calculate the most efficient means to travel between two spots on the HDD, thus resulting is less power consumption and less vibration from the HDD itself!

However, if you want super lightning fast IO (read/write) speeds, this HDD is not for you. It does have enough IO speed for the average user, but if you want truly super lightning fast speeds, you will want a Solid State Disk (SSD) (basically a hard drive with no moving parts, it is a very fast, albeit expensive, on-board flash drive, but SDD’s are another post…)

Now for some math:

This HDD is pretty expensive looking at GB/dollar (2048GB/$300 = 6.82GB/$ compared to Seagate’s 1.5 TB: 1536BG/$130 = 11.8GB/$), so in my opinion, I would either go with a pair of Seagate HDD’s (2 Seagate 1.5TB HDD’s-totaling 3TB-from Newegg.com cost $260, while one 2TB WD HDD costs $300 from Newegg) or just wait until the price drops (like everything does in the world of computers).

Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136344&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL040709&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL040709-_-HardDrives-_-LC3B-_-22136344

Western Digital 2TB product website: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=576

Western Digital home page: http://www.wdc.com/en/

-Da DreamBuild Crew