The Origins of Blogging
Jorn Barger is credited with the
first use of the term weblog when referring to his Robot Wisdom website in
December, 1997. Two years later, Peter Merholz coined the term blog after
writing in the sidebar of his weblog, “I’ve decided to pronounce the word
“weblog” as “wee-blog”. Or “blog” for short.” Merholz’s passing remark would
probably have produced few ripples if it was not for Pyra Labs. The company picked
up the word blog and decided to use it extensively. Within Pyra Labs, weblogs
were now referred to as blogs and their web logging application as “blogger”.
In June of 1999, blogger.com was registered as a domain name (Wikipedia, the
Blog Herald, eHow tech).
Blogging is something that has
evolved over the last two decades. Before blogging became popular, digital
communities took many forms, including Usenet, Genie, CompuServe, e-mail lists,
and Bulletin Board Systems. In the 1990’s, Internet forum software, created
running conversations with “threads” (Wikipedia,
Blogs) that connected topical messages. In June of 1993, the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) started a “What’s New” list of
sites. The site provided entries sorted by date and links to commentary (the
Blog Herald). In January of the following year, Justin Hall launches his
website which included links to and reviews of other sites. Two years later,
Hall commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries although each
daily post is linked through an index page (the
Blog Herald). The modern blog evolved from the online diary sites like that
of Hall.
Early blogs were simply manually
updated components of common Web sites. The evolution of tools to facilitate
the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological
order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical,
population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online
publishing that produces blogs we recognize today (Wikipedia,
Blogs).
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