History of Blogging

Before blogging became mainstream, digital communities took many forms, including e-mail lists, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and Usenet, along with commercial online services such as BiX, GEnie and the early CompuServe. In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with 'threads', which were topical connections between messages on a metaphorical 'corkboard'.

In 1993, Dr Glen Barry produced the first blog, the Forest Protection Blog, as a web based commentary, linking to other articles. In this political-style blog, Dr Barry campaigned for forest protection; the blog has been on the web continuously since January 1995, making it the web's first and longest continuously running blog. Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam in 1994, an online shared diary of a person's personal life, combining video, text, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site. Dave Winer's Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs, established in 1997.

After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularised by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools, such as Open Diary (1998), LiveJournal (1999) and blogger.com (1999). Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common web sites; however, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of web articles made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Blogs can now be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services.

The term 'weblog' was coined on 17 December 1997 by Jorn Barger, whilst the short form (blog) was coined by Peter Merholz in 1999. Merholz jokingly broke the word 'weblog' into the phrase 'we blog' in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com; shortly afterwards, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used 'blog' as both a noun and verb and devised the term 'blogger' in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularisation of the terms.