What we know as blogs today started in 1994 when Justin Hall, a then Swarthmore College student, created Links.net, where he recorded his day-to-day activities. Then it was not called a blog. He called it a personal homepage which served as a personal online journal. In 1997, Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom coined the term “weblog”.
The first known use of a blog on a traditional news site was by Jonathan Dube who blogged about Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer in 1998. Thereafter, programmer Peter Merholz in 1999 coined the term “blog” as a shortened form of weblog.
In 1999, Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs started a platform that later metamorphosed and become Blogger. It was the creation of Blogger that skyrocketed the growth of blogging and brought it into the mainstream of the internet.
In 2004, the word, blog, emerged Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” following the exponential increase in blogging.
Just to give you an idea of the kind of boom that took place. Jesse James Garrett compiled a list that revealed that there were 23 blogs on the internet in 1999. By the middle of 2006, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report revealed that the number of blogs on the internet had increased 50 million.
Looking at the history of blogging and considering how the earliest bloggers started in the 90s, we can say that they probably didn’t imagine that today, there will be millions of blogs giving insights into a vast array of topics or niches such as news, travel, health, technology, education, culture, religion and everything in between.
This article, A Brief History of Blogging, is a part or a continuation of a full blogging tutorial. To access the full course, or start from the beginning, please go to How to Start a blog and succeed: A Complete Blogging Tutorial or click HERE.
