How did blogging originate?

This is the guy who started it all...
On Dec. 17, 1997, Jorn Barger became the first person to use the term "weblog" to describe his collection of links logged from the internet.

Does anyone have a more detailed history of how it all started?

4 comments:

Curt said...

History

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.

Curt said...

Origins

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer's Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs. Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters.

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 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. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services.

Rizwaan Qasim said...

Most of the early blogs were mainly link driven websites. The links were posted with some of the editors commentary. An editor with some expertise in a could show the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article. They could provide additional facts he or she felt were relevant to the issue at hand. They could also simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked.

Rizwaan Qasim said...

These types of blogs provided a sort of filtering function for readers. The Internet had been basically pre-read and analyzed for them. Out of the myriad of web pages out there in cyberspace, blog editors would pick out the most incredible, the most stupid, the most unbelievable ones to highlight on.

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