A Short History of Blogs

It is ironic that a nickname for a tool that creates simple web pages has had such an impact on early twenty-first century culture. Although earlier technologies such as news wires or amateur "ham" radio networks share blogs' community-making function, blogging took specific form around the mid-1990s as electronic communities and Internet browsing became popular. Around 1997 Jorn Barger coined the term web log as it is used to describe the simple web pages people made to post links to interesting sites that they had found while surfing the Web. Authors of the Wikipedia.com web-based encyclopedia seem to agree that Peter Merholz first used the diminutive blog in the spring of 1999 when he posted the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his web log.

Blogging grew more popular after 1999 when several enterprising programming engineers began distributing some web log publishing tools over the Internet. Evan William and Meg Hourihan launched their company Pyra Labs to market their publishing platform, Blogger.com. Other blog software innovations distributed around the same time were Six Apart's Movable Type publishing system, Type Pad, and LiveJournal.

By the beginning of 2001, blogs had gained enough of a readership that more people felt comfortable looking to the blogosphere to share their opinions and feelings in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent military activity in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Blogs focusing on the war and politics gained more currency by 2003. The mainstream media began to appreciate and acknowledge the impact of bloggers in 2004 as politicians, corporations, and consultants began using them as tools for influencing opinion or spreading a specific message. By the summer of 2004, blogging had gained enough credibility that both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions granted bloggers access as bona fide journalists.