By way of a Mastodon post this morning, I learned that the term “weblog” is 25 years old today!
The Wikipedia article for “Blog” says that the term was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. Reading the Wikipedia article about Jorn Barger, we learn:
On December 17, 1997, inspired by Dave Winer's Scripting News and running on Winer's Frontier publishing software, Barger began posting daily entries to his Robot Wisdom Weblog in the hope of finding "an audience who might see the connections between [his] many interests." These postings featured "a list of links each day shaped by his own interests in the arts and technology," thus offering a "day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits” and coining the term "weblog" as a novel form of web publishing.
At two syllables, “weblog” was of course ripe for shortening and so did evolve into “blog” just a couple of years later.
A “log of daily activities published on the web” became a “weblog” which then became a “blog”.
I started what we now call “blogging” back in 2000 on a site called Advogato that actually referred to your content as a “diary”. But I do remember well that other sites were hosting “weblogs” and “blogs”.
Pretty wild to think that was 25 years ago! Happy Birthday to “weblog”!
