Co-creator of Blogger, author and software developer still finds time for Oregon blog directory

Blogger, MySpace, Facebook and Livejournal are words that have become popular on campuses around the country. Corvallis resident Paul Bausch contributed to the development of the technology that made blogs and social community a reality.

Bausch studied journalism at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. But he quickly got disillusioned by the broadcasting industry. He felt that local news was dictated by national agencies like The Associated Press and that only national events mattered. The role of local or campus news outlets was basically to republish whatever story was provided to them.

“Find a local angle and rewrite it … ,” said Bausch of his college journalism experience. “This was extremely discouraging to me.”

While working on his degree, Bausch also did programming on the side. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco to work for an e-commerce company. Not long after, two of his classmates asked him to become the first employee of Pyra Labs, the company they had just created. The company’s goal was to develop new project management tools. While the tool itself never found a sizeable audience, one of its components generated a lot of interest. The component was an application that will list notes in reverse chronological order. Pyra Labs decided to shift its focus to develop the component. Bausch, along with Pyra Labs co-founders Meg Hourihan and Evan Williams, ended up writing most of the code for the new application, a Weblog tool named Blogger.

Weblog was not a novelty by then and Bausch was already maintaining one to find connections with other people through the Internet. But Blogger would participate in the blog revolution by easing the process of creating and maintaining a blog. The Blogger service took off on its own and the usage exploded once the company started Blogspot, a hosting service for blogs.

The year 2004 was a time of recognition for blogs. Merriam-Webster named blog the number one word of the year and PC Magazine named blog pioneer Bausch and his colleagues People of the Year.

With more than 10 posts made per second and 26 millions blog sites referenced, blogging has become one of the most popular phenomenons on the Internet.

Bausch feels the development of blogs also benefits freedom of speech by altering and distributing the power that a few news organization concentrated in the past.

“They circumvent the normal channel of communication. It takes some power away from the gatekeeper,” said Bausch.

While Bausch is still highly involved in what is now known as social software, he moved to Corvallis in 2002 to become a software consultant and an author. He founded ORblogs, a directory of blogs written by Oregonians.

“My voice can reach other countries,” he said. “It can now reach people around the corner.”

NOTE: this is a reprint of a story published in the OSU Daily Barometer. The original is Blog pioneer wants to foster local voices