THE HISTORY OF BLOGS

Although blogging is a fairly recent invention, its concept is not new at all.  Electronic communities had existed long before internetworking.  The AP wire was, in many ways, similar to a large chat room where there were “wire fights” and electronic conversations. Similarly, another pre-digital electronic community, the amateur (“ham”) radio, allowed individuals who set up their own broadcast equipment to communicate with others directly.   Interestingly, ham radio also had logs called “glogs” that were personal diaries made using wearable computers in the early 1980s (Stone, 2002).

In the proto-internet era, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, email lists and bulletin board services (BBS’s). In the 1990s Internet forum software, such as WebX, created running conversations with threads. The term “thread,” in reference to consecutive messages on one specific topic of discussion, comes from email lists and Usenet terminology, and “to post” from electronic bulletin boards, borrowing usage directly from their predecessors (Stone, 2005).  In fact, many of the terms from blogging are loaned from these earlier media.  Diarists also kept journals on the internet: most called themselves online diarists, journalists, or journalers. A few called themselves “escribitionists.”

But it is uncertain as to who actually invented or created the “first” blog.  It is still a controversial issue, for many contrasting theories still float out there in the blogopshere.  Justin Hall, who began his proto-blog in 1994 while still a student at Swarthmore College, is often credited being the first online journaller, and thus the “forefather” of modern-day blogging.  (Wikipedia, 2005)   Yet, some would go further back in time and argue that blogging is nothing more than the early form of the internet; hence, the first blogger was none other than Tim Berners-Lee, the credited inventor of the internet who connected different websites together.  Biz Stone argues that the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) services like GeoCities that were so popular of the mid-1990’s were merely blogs dressed in somewhat different coding (Stone, 2002). 

Similarly, origins of  the term “weblog” is also uncertain. Many point to Jorn Barger in December 1997 when he coined the term on his own blog.  The shorter version, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in 1999.   Fortuitously, this play on words eventually took off, and “blog” as a short form not only became a household noun, but also as a verb.  Moreover, “to blog” and “blogging” not only came to mean a person editing or making a post to his or her own weblog, but ultimately became a popular terminology in the lexicon of the English speaking world.  Indeed, in March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms "weblog," "weblogging" and “weblogger” in its dictionary.   Merriam-Webster's Dictionary astonishingly declared “blog” as the word of the year in 2004. (Wikinews)

Interestingly, in 1998 there were just a handful of sites that were blogs.   Jesse James Garrett, an information architect, began compiling a list of sites similar to Barger's.  In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett who later published the list on Camworld;others maintaining similar sites began sending their blog links to him for inclusion on the list.  With this tiny group of blogging pioneers, Jesse James Garrett's Page of only Weblogs was able to list the twenty-three known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999.   Garrett's webpage deliberately stopped its updates as of October 12, 2000, for he reasons that he had chosen to leave it up as it has become a subject of historical interest (perhaps realizing that the blogging phenonemon was about to take off).