Meg Hourihan

Cocreator of Blogger

• Born: 1973
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

Primary Company/Organization: Pyra Labs

Introduction

Meg Hourihan cofounded Pyra Labs, which created the popular blogging software Blogger, a free web-based tool that introduced a simple means of launching a personal website, the blog. Blogger was later bought by Google. An innovative entrepreneur and pioneer blogger, Hourihan wrote the award-winning blog Megnut.com and was one of Technology Review's TR35 (“35 innovators under 35”) and one of PC Magazine's People of the Year in 2004. Along with Blogger cocreators Paul Bausch and Matthew Haughey, Hourihan published the book We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogsin 2002. She spoke frequently on the subject of blogs and young women entrepreneurs.

Early Life

Meg Hourihan was born in 1973 in Boston, Massachusetts, where she grew up. She became interested in technology at a young age. She attended Tufts University and majored in English, then worked at a consulting firm before cofounding Pyra Labs.

Life's Work

In January 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, Hourihan founded Pyra Labs in San Francisco with fellow pioneer web designer, blog creator, and then boyfriend Evan Williams. (Williams later became widely known for developing Twitter.) Paul Bausch, one of Williams's friends from high school, later joined. The team's initial goal was to create a web-based tool that would help project managers share information with coworkers. Their first project was a web tool called Pyra, which combined a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list. The team later repurposed Pyra into the in-house tool Blogger, which was made public in August 1999. Blogger was a free, web-based tool that allowed users to create and promote their own websites. Hourihan, with her background in English, was interested in creating the blog as a tool that was attractive to the nontech crowd. She recognized that the Internet was becoming an increasingly popular venue for expression for all users across web and that blogs could be the primary vehicle. Before Blogger, web users who wanted to create a weblog had to be fluent in HTML coding and rent server space. Blogger's team capitalized on the creation of a simple interface to promote usability, and Pyra hosted the web space for free. Hourihan began her blog in May 1999. In the early 2000s there were barely 100 blogs; about a decade later, the blogosphere included more than 100 million, with many boasting thousands of visits each day.

Initial coding for Blogger was done by Williams and Matthew Haughey, who went on to found MetaFilter. At first free of charge, Blogger met difficulty when its funds dried up in 2001, less than a year after the NASDAQ dive that heralded the dot-com bust in April 2000. This end of the initial Internet boom that challenged the still-nascent means of subsidizing online personal websites, and the question of how to subsidize them was a driving force in their evolution. Initially, Pyra survived the plunge of Internet start-ups through venture capitalist investors and with help from Hourihan's parents, but Pyra needed a steady stream of revenue for the long term.

Pyra Labs and Williams were revolutionary in asking their blogger users for funds, but as the tech bubble burst and Blogger depleted its funds, the company's five employees, including Hourihan, walked out. Williams ran the company alone until he was able to garner the support of Trellix creator Dan Bricklin, who invested in it after becoming aware of Blogger's situation and did not want to see the groundbreaking blogging tool disappear.

By June 2001, Blogger had started making money by charging for added features. As the popularity of Blogger across the blogosphere increased, advertisers provided the main revenue, and in 2002 Blogger underwent a major overhaul and in its expanded form was licensed to large global companies such as Globo.com in Brazil. Advance Publications, an American media company, also invested in Blogger.

Hourihan and other pioneer blog users theorized early that the nature of blogging was influenced by the events of September 2001, which increased the capabilities of the blogosphere for nonjournalist civilians to share political thoughts and reactions to global news from across the political spectrum. Hourihan remains adamant that blogging is more about the lives of everyday people negotiating the creative and collaborative possibilities of the web than web engineers interested in its economic possibilities.

In 2001, when Hourihan left Pyra Labs, she cofounded the Lafayette Project in New York City, which seeks to mine editorial content on blogs to improve reader news service. In February 2003, Google bought Blogger for a reputed eight figures and hosts the website and its servers. Hourihan earned millions of dollars from the sale.

When she was thirty-one, Hourihan was named one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review Top Innovators under 35. In 2004, she was named one of PC Magazine's People of the Year, along with team members Williams and Bausch and the creators of rival software company Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type.

Hourihan has collaborated with many successful entrepreneurs, but not all projects were successful. Kinja.com, a news aggregator that Hourihan helped launched in 2003 with British journalism and Internet entrepreneur Nick Denton—founder of the blog collective Gawker Media—never managed to gain momentum. From 2006 to 2007, Hourihan was a member of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Advisory Board.

Hourihan spoke frequently about online journalism and the role of women in online technology. Ironically, she often fielded questions about her work with Williams (who skyrocketed to popularity after the global success of Twitter) rather than her own endeavors. Nevertheless, Hourihan remains an exemplary figure in the Internet's entrepreneurial history. A feminist, she has argued that “more proactive encouragement of women in technology needs to happen. At least now it seems like girls have more exposure to it at younger ages and the opportunity to be familiar with it from the beginning.”

In a New York Times article, Hourihan explained how she writes for a small audience, even though everyone knows that blogging's intimacy—which is part of its allure—is accessible to a much larger audience. “My guiding principle is always to write with my grandparents in mind. It keeps me from being too personal or too technical or too complainy.” Hourihan also notes the uniqueness of time stamps and permalinks.

Hourihan has written a monthly column for the O'Reilly Network. In a June 2012 blog entry she wrote, “What's important [regarding blogging] is that we've embraced a medium free of the physical limitations of pages, intrusions of editors, and delays of tedious publishing systems. As with free speech itself, what we say is not as important as the system that enables us to say it.”

From 1999 to 2018 Hourihan published Megnut, a personal blog that boasted a self-portrait taken in the mirror (a common trend among web gurus) and for several years showcased her work on food. She also served as a senior adviser to Serious Eats, a recipient of the James Beard Foundation's Best Food Blog award. Considered one of the first serious food bloggers, Hourihan has challenged foodie blog readers to consider not only food sustainability but also how crowd-sourcing of recipe sites jeopardizes their quality and reliability. Since 2019, she has led her company Megnut LLC, which helps start-ups develop business plans, strategies, and market analyses.

Personal Life

In March 2000, Hourihan met her husband, Jason Kottke, at South by Southwest (SXSW), a popular web technology convention held annually in Austin, Texas. At the time, Hourihan was still living in San Francisco. Kottke is a web designer and pioneer blogger who created the Silkscreen typeface and won a Bloggie Lifetime Achievement Award. Hourihan and Kottke dated off and on while each maintained popular blogs; subsequently, their relationship became a cause célèbre in the blogosphere. In 2005 Hourihan and Kottke they briefly broke up, with Hourihan moving from New York City, where she had been living since 2002, to New Hampshire, where she relied on dial-up Internet access. She rekindled the relationship with Kottke, and the couple married in March 2006. They have two children, Ollie and Minna. Hourihan is an avid runner and writes often about her children.

Hourihan was a trustee of the Mad River Glen ski co-op from 2014 to 2019. She became a certified free-skiing coach in 2018.

Bibliography

Bausch, Paul, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan. We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2002. Print.

Greenman, Catherine. “A Blogger's Big Fish Fantasy.” New York Times 19 June 2003. Print.

Mead, Rebecca. “Meg and Jason.” New Yorker 5 June 2006: 30–31. Print.

Mead, Rebecca. “You've Got Blog.” New Yorker 13 Nov. 2000: 102–08. Print.

Rosenberg, Scott, ed. “The Blogger Catapult: Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan.” Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. New York: Crown, 2009. Print.