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03/15/2005: "Blogging begins"

Description: The early days of Blogs and Blogging.

Blogging begins

Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier, specifically blogrolls and trackbacks, as well as comments. This way, instead of a few people being in control of threads on a forum, or anyone able to start threads on a list, there was a moderating effect that was the personality of the weblog's owner.

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997.
"Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide [whom] you get to know. There are many guides to choose from and each develops an audience. There's camaraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs. They point to each other in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc."—Dave Winer, [1]

The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz who in April or May of 1999 broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog [2]. This was interpreted as a short form of the noun [3] and also as a verb, to blog, meaning "to edit one's weblog or a post to one's weblog." Usage spread during 1999, with the word being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted weblog tools: Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan's company Pyra Labs launched Blogger (which was purchased by Google in 2004) and Paul Kedrosky's GrokSoup. As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary. [4]

One of the pioneers of the tools that make blogging more than merely websites that scroll is Dave Winer. One of his most important contributions was the creation of servers which weblogs would ping to show that they had updated. Blog reading utilities, such as Blogrolling [5], use the aggregated update data to show a user when their favorite blogs have new posts.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.