History of Weblogs

History of Blogs

The history of weblogs or history of blogs actually only spans over a few years. The internet with its 1 trillion plus pages on it, is only a couple decades old, and it is still evolving today.

The web blog history starts with Tim Berners-Lee creator of http://www.info.cern.ch/ and father of the internet. He created a website at CERN that kept track of all new websites as they came online. A much easier task in those days.

The National Association for Supercomputing Applications (NASA) started a “Whats new list of sites,” in 1993, which kept track of new websites as they appeared online and allowed for commenting. They would later be taken over by Netscape.

Both of those sites had many “blog like” characteristics, but the first actual blog was created by Justin Hall in 1994. The site was called “Justins Home Page” (Later it would be renamed “links from the underground”) and listed and reviewed new sites coming on the web.

In 1996 Justin started writing Daily entries and started using it more as an online Journal where he posted ideas and lessons learned throughout the day. More importantly these pages were dated with the most recent posts listed on the top of the homepage. This is the standard for blogs today and is really used to define a blog.

As blogs started to scatter across the web, Jorn Bagger noticed the similarities between these sites and diary logs and as such he coined the phrase, “web log” or “weblog” which would stick as the official name, until 1999 when Peter Merholz separated the words by posting the phrase, “wee-blog” on his sidebar. “Wee-Blog” was later considered to be “We Blog” whereas blog is the verb and therefore to write on a weblog is considered to blog. The word weblog would fall out of popularity and be replaced by the word blog over time.

In the late 1990s blogs were still a new invention and there were only a few of them even around. Jessie James Garrett editor of Infoshift started looking for sites that were similar to his and created the first ever list of blogs.

He then sent the list to Carmeton Barrett who published it as the 23 blogs know to exist in 1999. As new blogs appeared on the web they would request to be published on the list. Until eventually the list became too big to keep track of manually and was reduced to the list of blogs that Carmeton himself followed.

The history of Blogs would take its first giant leap when Pitas launched in 1999 and later when Blogger launched in August 1999. Both tools making it fast and easy for everyone (not just experienced programmers) to create their own blog on the net in minutes.

The ease of creating a blog in literally minutes meant the web was a place where anyone and everyone could express themselves. Whereas in 1999 there were 23 known blogs online, 10 years later, in 2009 that number had swollen to an estimated 126 million blogs online, an unbelievable growth rate.

Today with the creating of new social media sites such as twitter, stumbleupon, etc. The history of blogs is sure to continue to grow over time. Only time will tell what the history of weblogs will look like in the future.

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