The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger^[9] on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.^[10][11][12] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog", meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.^[13]

Origins

Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, Byte Information Exchange (BIX) and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists,^[14] and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software created running conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections between messages on a virtual "corkboard". From 14 June 1993, Mosaic Communications Corporation maintained their "What’s New"^[15] list of new websites, updated daily and archived monthly. The page was accessible by a special "What's New" button in the Mosaic web browser.

The earliest instance of a commercial blog was on the first business to consumer Web site created in 1995 by Ty, Inc., which featured a blog in a section called "Online Diary". The entries were maintained by featured Beanie Babiesthat were voted for monthly by Web site visitors.^[16]

The modern blog evolved from the online diary where people would keep a running account of the events in their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earlier bloggers,^[17] as is Jerry Pournelle.^[18] Dave Winer's Scripting News is also credited with being one of the older and longer running weblogs.^[19][20] The Australian Netguide magazine maintained the Daily Net News^[21] on their web site from 1996. Daily Net News ran links and daily reviews of new websites, mostly in Australia.

Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, digital video, and digital pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters. Some early bloggers, such as The Misanthropic Bitch, who began in 1997, actually referred to their online presence as a zine, before the term blog entered common usage.

Technology

Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Websites. In 1995, the "Online Diary" on the Ty, Inc. Web site was produced and updated manually before any blogging programs were available. Posts were made to appear in reverse chronological order by manually updating text based HTML code using FTP software in real time several times a day. To users, this offered the appearance of a live diary that contained multiple new entries per day. At the beginning of each new day, new diary entries were manually coded into a new HTML file, and the start of each month, diary entries were archived into its own folder which contained a separate HTML page for every day of the month. Then menus that contained links to the most recent diary entry were updated manually throughout the site. This text-based method of organizing thousands of files served as a springboard to define future blogging styles that were captured by blogging software developed years later.^[16]

The evolution of electronic and software tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger and less technically-inclined population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, on regular web hosting services, or run using blog software.