The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

The term blog derives from web log, which is simply another word for an online journal. Peter Merholz then took the word WeBLOG and separated it into We Blog in a sidebar of his web page, www.Peterme.com.

Entrepreneur Evan Williams, developer for Pyra Labs’ Blogger.com, first used the word blog as both a verb and a noun—in reference to posting to one’s web log—and thus officially created the term blogger.

Before HTTP was in common use, a service called Usenet was the primary medium for communicating over the World Wide Web. Usenet featured a moderated newsgroup, which was either group- or individually controlled. Around this same time, Brian E. Redman—generally known as the first individual blogger—began posting summaries of other interesting information he found on the Internet, and thereby created his own blog called mod.ber (named for his initials, B.E.R.).

Back in the mid-1990s, there were online communities such as GEnie, BiX, EarthLink, Prodigy, and CompuServe, all of which were the earliest ISPs (Internet service providers) that provided bulletin board systems (BBS) and forums. Later, people would use this type of Internet software to create online diaries or journals to document daily activities of their personal lives. They called themselves diarists, ...