History of the Blog

We all know that the modern concept of the blog developed from online diaries. The Wikipedia definition of blog is:

"A blog is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog."

But do you know how the term blog actually came about? I was curious so I did some research. The term "weblog" was actually coined by US blogger Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. Barger is best known as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger used the term to describe the new kind of website that was emerging at the time that was a sort of an annotated bookmarks list available for public viewing, a “log” of journeys around the fledging web with links and commentaries.

The short form, "blog," was coined by his colleague Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase wee blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. You can actually see this in an archived version of the site from the Wayback Machine and he later discusses the impact his joke has had.

The word blog has now been adopted as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog"). But who is considered to be the world's first blogger? Ah that opens a different can of worms entirely and is a post for another day. Stay tuned!