PR and the Social Web

The word Blog is a contraction of ‘web log’.  It’s hard to be exact about when blogging started. The peripheral  ‘blogger’ Jorn Barger editor of the blog Robot Wisdom, effectively invented the term ‘weblog’ but the term “blog” was not used for another two and a half years.   It was first employed by Peter Merholz and intended as a joke. He broke the word weblog into two words we blog in his own peterme.com blog.  In doing so he essentially created the verb “to blog,” meaning to create a weblog as well as initiating the contraction of the noun into its now popular form.

The first bloggers were the effectively online diarists, who would keep a running account of their lives.  These blogs began well before the term was coined and the authors referred to themselves usually as diarists or online journalists.  Perhaps the first of these and therefore the original blogger was Justin Hall, who began blogging in 1994 and posted his first regular blog ‘Justin’s links to the underground’ whilst a still a student.    Blogging took off when the publishing platform Blogger was launched in August 1999.  It quickly became the most popular and simple to use blogging tool and it allowed mainstream internet users with little or no technical knowledge to start blogs.  Blogger was bought by Google in 2003.