Origins of Blogging Before there were blogs, there were personal homepages.
Before there were personal homepages, there were people trying to figure out what the new World Wide Web was actually for.
Today, "blog" sounds almost boring. It is just a website where someone publishes posts. But that description hides how strange the idea originally was. In the 1990s, publishing something on the Internet was still a technical activity. You needed a server, HTML knowledge, FTP, or access to some hosting service. There was no WordPress dashboard, no Blogger editor, no social media feed and no notification telling your followers that you had published something.
The history of blogging is therefore not just the history of a particular type of website. It is the history of the Web becoming a publishing medium for ordinary people.
It started with personal homepages, links, online diaries and people manually editing HTML. Then came weblogs, blogging software, comments, RSS, blogrolls and hosted platforms. By the middle of the 2000s, blogs had become a major part of the Internet's culture and media system.
And then something interesting happened: the blog did not disappear when social media arrived.
It changed shape.
Before blogging: the personal homepage
The Web was designed as a publishing system from the beginning. Tim Berners-Lee's original idea at CERN was not a social network. It was a way to connect documents and information using hypertext.
But once people outside CERN started getting access to the Web, they quickly discovered another possibility: you could make a page about yourself.
In the mid-1990s, a personal homepage was often the closest thing the Internet had to a social profile. Someone might put their photograph on it, write a few paragraphs about themselves, publish a list of favorite links, describe their hobbies, post some photographs or simply write whatever they wanted.
These pages were often handmade.
There was no "New Post" button. You edited an HTML file, uploaded it to a server and hoped you had not broken anything.
Services such as GeoCities made this easier by giving ordinary users a place to create websites without operating their own server. The resulting pages were often messy, colorful and highly personal. Animated GIFs, visitor counters, tiled backgrounds and "under construction" signs were everywhere.
They did not necessarily look like modern blogs, but culturally they were important. They established the idea that the Web was not only something you read. It was something you could publish on.
1994: Justin Hall starts publishing
One of the names that repeatedly appears in discussions about the beginning of blogging is Justin Hall.
In 1994, while he was a student at Swarthmore College, Hall started publishing on Links.net. The site contained links, writing and personal material, and Hall continued publishing there for years.
Calling Links.net the "first blog" is slightly misleading because the word blog did not exist yet. Hall did not start a blog in the modern sense. He was publishing on the Web before the category had a name.
This distinction matters.
The history of blogging did not begin with somebody inventing a new website format called "blogging". It evolved gradually out of things people were already doing.
People published links.
People kept online diaries.
People wrote commentary.
People maintained personal homepages.
Eventually, these different practices started to look like one recognizable form of publishing.
1997: the word "weblog"
The word that eventually became "blog" appeared in December 1997.
Jorn Barger ran a website called Robot Wisdom. On December 17, 1997, he used the term weblog to describe a site that essentially logged the Web through a constantly updated collection of links and commentary.
The name was deliberately descriptive: a log of the Web.
At this point, the typical weblog was not necessarily somebody writing 1,500-word essays about their breakfast. Many early weblogs were closer to curated link lists. The author browsed the Web, found something interesting, added a link and wrote a short comment.
In a way, the early weblog was part bookmark collection, part newspaper column and part personal notebook.
That basic structure would become extremely important.
Dave Winer and the technical side of blogging
Another important figure in the early history of blogging was Dave Winer.
Winer's Scripting News became one of the longest-running examples of frequently updated Web publishing. It also became important technically because Winer worked on tools and standards that helped turn blogs into machine-readable, subscribable publications.
His work was particularly important to the development of RSS.
RSS eventually allowed readers to subscribe to websites without visiting every site manually. Instead of checking ten blogs to see whether anything had changed, a feed reader could collect their new posts in one place.
This sounds trivial now. It was not.
RSS helped establish an idea that would become central to blogging: you could publish once and let readers subscribe to you.
The history of RSS is complicated, with several competing versions and contributors, but the first major formats appeared in 1999. RSS 0.90 was created at Netscape in March 1999, followed by further development involving Netscape and UserLand. RSS 2.0 eventually became the most recognizable version of the format.
1998: blogs start becoming a format
By 1998, the pieces were beginning to come together.
Websites were being updated frequently. Posts were appearing in reverse chronological order. Links and commentary were mixed together. Readers were beginning to leave comments and follow particular writers.
The format was still small, but it was becoming recognizable.
One important example came from journalism. In August 1998, the Charlotte Observer used a blog-like format to report on Hurricane Bonnie. It was an early example of the Web being used for continuously updated reporting rather than simply publishing a finished newspaper article.
That was an early indication of what blogs could eventually become.
They did not have to be diaries.
They could be news sites.
They could be technical publications.
They could be political commentary.
They could be almost anything.
1998: Open Diary
The next major change was making publishing easier.
Open Diary launched in October 1998. Unlike a handmade personal homepage, it was designed specifically around online diaries and interaction between writers and readers.
That changed the social character of personal publishing.
You did not necessarily need to know HTML anymore. You could write something, publish it and receive responses from other users.
Blogging was slowly becoming less like maintaining a website and more like participating in a community.
1999: the word becomes "blog"
The word weblog did not remain intact for long.
In 1999, programmer Peter Merholz jokingly broke the word "weblog" into the phrase "we blog" on his website Peterme.com.
The shorter word stuck.
It was much easier to say.
Blog.
Blogging.
Blogger.
Suddenly there was a name for the activity.
That same year, several services appeared that made publishing a blog dramatically easier.
1999: Blogger changes everything
Pyra Labs launched Blogger in 1999.
The importance of Blogger was not that it invented online publishing. People had already been doing that for years.
Its importance was that it removed much of the technical work.
Instead of opening an HTML file, editing code, saving it, uploading it and checking whether everything worked, you could open a browser, write a post and publish it.
That difference was enormous.
The Web had already democratized access to information. Blogging platforms started democratizing the ability to publish information.
Those are not the same thing.
A Web page was possible for almost anyone with enough technical knowledge. A blog was becoming possible for almost anyone.
In 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs and Blogger, helping push the service even further into the mainstream.
1999: LiveJournal takes another path
Another important service appeared in 1999: LiveJournal.
Where Blogger focused on making Web publishing simple, LiveJournal emphasized community and personal journaling.
Users could maintain journals, follow other users and interact with their entries. The result was closer to a social network than the static personal homepage of the mid-1990s.
This is an important part of blogging history because the blog was never just one thing.
Some people wanted a website.
Some wanted a diary.
Some wanted an audience.
Some wanted a community.
Some wanted to publish news.
The software began adapting to all of them.
Blogrolls and the early blogosphere
One of the defining features of early blogs was the blogroll.
A blogroll was simply a list of other blogs that the author recommended or regularly read.
Today, that sounds almost quaint. At the time, it was one of the mechanisms that held the blogosphere together.
There was no giant algorithmic feed deciding what you should read next.
Instead, you found one interesting blog, looked at its links, discovered five more blogs and then followed their links.
The Web's hyperlink structure became the social graph.
Blogs were connected through links, comments, blogrolls and RSS subscriptions.
2001: Movable Type
By the beginning of the 2000s, blogging software was becoming more sophisticated.
Movable Type, released by Six Apart in 2001, became particularly influential among people who wanted more control than hosted services provided.
This created an important division that would remain for years:
- Hosted blogging platforms were easy to use.
- Self-hosted blogging software gave you more control.
The distinction is still familiar today.
The same basic argument exists between publishing on somebody else's platform and running your own website.
Blogging becomes journalism
As blogs became easier to create, people started using them for things that looked increasingly like journalism.
Technology bloggers could publish news before newspapers printed it.
Political bloggers could comment on events immediately instead of waiting for the next edition of a magazine.
People inside industries could write about subjects that mainstream publications rarely covered.
Experts could publish directly to their audience without needing a publisher.
This changed the relationship between publishing and distribution.
A journalist no longer necessarily needed a newspaper.
A programmer no longer necessarily needed a magazine.
A researcher no longer necessarily needed a publisher to share an observation.
Anyone with a domain, hosting and something to say could become a publisher.
2002: the blogosphere gets its name
By the early 2000s, there were enough blogs that people began talking about the "blogosphere" as a distinct part of the Internet.
Search engines and specialized services appeared to help people find blogs.
Technorati, launched in 2002, became one of the best-known blog search and tracking services.
At its peak, Technorati was not simply a search engine. It was part of the infrastructure through which people discovered what other bloggers were discussing.
The blogosphere had become a network.
2003: WordPress arrives
Then came WordPress.
WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of b2/cafelog. The first release was WordPress 0.7.
The project was open source and focused heavily on usability, standards and making personal publishing easier.
That combination turned out to be extremely powerful.
WordPress was not the first blogging platform, but it became one of the most important pieces of publishing software ever created.
Its history also shows how blogging software gradually stopped being "blogging software" in the narrow sense.
Pages were added.
Themes became more sophisticated.
Plugins extended the system.
People started using WordPress for company websites, newspapers, magazines, portfolios, documentation, stores and almost everything else.
WordPress itself describes its origins as a response to the need for an elegant personal publishing system.
Blogging becomes a mainstream medium
By the middle of the 2000s, blogging was no longer an obscure Internet hobby.
There were millions of blogs covering almost every imaginable subject.
Personal blogs documented people's lives.
Technology blogs competed with technology magazines.
Political blogs became part of political discussion.
Fashion bloggers built audiences around their personal taste.
Food bloggers published recipes and restaurant reviews.
Travel bloggers turned their trips into ongoing publications.
Corporate blogs became part of marketing departments.
And ordinary people were publishing things simply because they wanted to.
That last category was arguably the most important.
The Internet had developed a huge population of people who were neither professional journalists nor professional publishers, but who nevertheless had their own publications.
The rise of the personal blog
There was something fundamentally different about reading a good personal blog.
A newspaper article generally tried to sound like a publication.
A blog could sound like a person.
The writing could be informal. It could be opinionated. It could be unfinished. It could include inside jokes, links to friends, photographs, mistakes and completely irrelevant observations.
That personal voice became one of blogging's defining characteristics.
The blog was not necessarily trying to become a newspaper.
Sometimes it was simply one person's corner of the Internet.
RSS changes how people read blogs
As the number of blogs grew, manually visiting every website became impractical.
RSS solved part of the problem.
A blog could publish an RSS feed containing its latest posts. Readers could subscribe to that feed using an RSS reader or aggregator.
This created a very different model from today's social media feeds.
You chose the publications.
The publisher produced the feed.
The reader's software collected it.
There was no central algorithm required to decide which publication you were allowed to see.
RSS 2.0 was formally published through Harvard's Berkman Center in 2003 after UserLand transferred the specification there. The specification describes RSS as a Web content syndication format.
For a period, this was one of the most important ideas in online publishing.
Blogging meets advertising
Once blogs developed audiences, another question appeared:
Could you make money from one?
The answer was yes, although the business models varied enormously.
Some bloggers sold advertising.
Some used affiliate links.
Some accepted sponsorships.
Some wrote books.
Some turned their blogs into consulting businesses.
Some became professional writers.
Some built companies around their audiences.
The blog therefore became more than a publishing format. It became a possible business.
Blogging and the news cycle
Traditional media organizations initially treated blogs in different ways. Some ignored them. Some considered them amateur publications. Others realized that blogs could do things traditional publishing was bad at.
A blog could be updated immediately.
A blogger could correct an article publicly.
Readers could respond directly.
Links could connect an article to dozens of related sources.
A small specialist publication could compete for attention with a much larger organization.
This did not make blogs automatically more accurate than newspapers. It simply changed the economics and speed of publishing.
The blogosphere becomes social
Blogging also created an early form of social media before "social media" became the dominant term.
People linked to each other.
They commented.
They responded to posts with posts of their own.
They maintained blogrolls.
They subscribed through RSS.
They met through forums and conferences.
The resulting network was decentralized but highly interconnected.
It was possible to build a large audience without having a profile on a single central website.
2005 to 2010: blogging gets crowded
By the second half of the 2000s, blogging had become an enormous ecosystem.
There were personal blogs, corporate blogs, professional blogs, political blogs, celebrity blogs, photo blogs, video blogs, group blogs and niche blogs.
There were also increasingly sophisticated publishing systems.
The blog was becoming a standard component of a website.
In fact, the word "blog" gradually started losing some of its original meaning.
A technology company could have a "blog" that looked like an online magazine.
A newspaper could have dozens of blogs written by its staff.
A politician could have a blog maintained by a communications team.
A corporation could call its news section a blog.
Meanwhile, millions of people still used blogs as personal diaries.
The same word covered all of them.
Then social media arrived
The next major transformation came from social networks.
Facebook, Twitter and later Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and other platforms changed how people published online.
Publishing became even easier.
You no longer necessarily needed your own website.
You did not need to understand HTML.
You did not even need to understand what a blog was.
You simply opened an account and posted.
The result was a huge expansion in online publishing, but it also changed its structure.
Instead of a decentralized collection of websites connected through links and RSS, more and more publishing happened inside centralized platforms.
Your audience was no longer necessarily "subscribed to your website". It was following your account on somebody else's service.
That distinction would become increasingly important.
Tumblr and the rise of short-form blogging
Tumblr, launched in 2007, occupied an interesting middle ground.
It preserved some of the culture of blogging while making posting extremely lightweight.
Text, photographs, quotations, links, audio and video could all become posts.
The result was faster and more visual than traditional blogs.
It was also heavily networked. Following another Tumblr account created a stream of its posts, making the experience feel much more like a social network.
In retrospect, Tumblr was part of the transition between the classic blog and the modern social feed.
Blogging becomes mobile
The smartphone changed blogging again.
In the early blogging era, publishing usually meant sitting at a computer.
Mobile publishing changed that completely.
A photograph could be taken and published immediately.
A short observation could be posted while walking down a street.
A video could be uploaded from a phone.
For many people, the blog became less important as a distinct format because the basic act of publishing had become a built-in feature of everyday computing.
2012: Medium and the return of the writing platform
Then came another interesting development.
Instead of making everyone build a website, platforms started making the writing itself the product.
Medium, launched in 2012, became one of the best-known examples.
The interface was deliberately focused on writing and reading rather than website administration.
That represented a recurring pattern in blogging history.
Every few years, somebody tried to remove another layer of technical complexity from publishing.
Hand-written HTML became blogging software.
Blogging software became hosted platforms.
Hosted platforms became mobile apps.
And eventually publishing became a feature inside almost every major Internet service.
Blogs did not actually disappear
People have occasionally declared blogging dead since the rise of social media.
The prediction has not really held up.
What changed was the definition of the blog.
Some blogs became online magazines.
Some became company websites.
Some became newsletters.
Some became personal archives.
Some became technical documentation.
Some became almost invisible because the reader consumed their content through RSS, search engines, email or social media.
And some remained exactly what they had been in the beginning: one person writing on their own website.
The return of independent publishing
Something else happened as centralized platforms became dominant.
Some writers started returning to independent websites.
The reasons varied.
Some wanted ownership of their archives.
Some disliked algorithmic feeds.
Some wanted a permanent domain instead of a profile on someone else's platform.
Some wanted RSS.
Some simply liked having a website.
This produced a renewed interest in personal websites, static site generators, independent blogs and other forms of small-scale publishing.
The technology had come full circle.
In 1994, maintaining a personal website was technically difficult.
By the 2010s and 2020s, tools made it possible to build extremely fast personal websites with relatively little infrastructure.
The old idea of "my own corner of the Web" became attractive again.
Blogging becomes newsletters
Another descendant of blogging is the email newsletter.
At first glance, newsletters look different from blogs. One arrives in your inbox while the other lives on a website.
But structurally they are remarkably similar.
One person or organization publishes a sequence of entries.
Readers subscribe.
New entries are delivered to them.
The author develops a continuing relationship with an audience.
In that sense, many modern newsletters are essentially blogs with email delivery layered on top.
What happened to RSS?
RSS lost some of its mainstream visibility when social networks became the dominant way people discovered content, but the technology never disappeared.
RSS remains a simple way for websites to publish machine-readable updates, and many blogs, podcasts and other publications continue to provide feeds.
There is a reason the idea has survived for so long.
It solves a very basic problem:
How can a reader follow a website without depending on the website's own interface?
RSS provides a clean answer.
The blog as an archive
One of the less obvious things blogging created was the personal public archive.
A social media post is often designed to disappear into a timeline.
A blog post can remain accessible for twenty years.
It can have a permanent URL.
It can appear in search results.
It can be linked by another writer.
It can be cited by researchers.
It can become part of the history of the Web.
This is one reason old blogs are so valuable today. They contain a record of what ordinary people thought, built, experienced and published at a particular moment.
Not everything worth preserving was written by a newspaper.
A lot of the early Web exists in personal archives.
The technical legacy of blogging
Blogging also left behind a surprising amount of Internet infrastructure.
Permalinks made individual posts addressable.
RSS made publications subscribable.
Comments made publishing interactive.
Trackbacks and pingbacks attempted to connect related publications.
Blogrolls created human-maintained recommendation networks.
Categories and tags created lightweight information architectures.
Content management systems separated writing from presentation.
Themes separated design from content.
Plugins made publishing systems extensible.
Many of these ideas became normal parts of the modern Web.
From blog to CMS
Perhaps the biggest technical legacy is the transformation of blogging software into content management systems.
Originally, the software existed to publish posts.
Eventually, people wanted pages, navigation, media libraries, user accounts, search, plugins, themes, commerce and custom content types.
At that point, the distinction between "blog software" and "website software" became difficult to maintain.
WordPress is the clearest example.
It began as blogging software in 2003. Today it is used far beyond personal blogs, and WordPress.org describes the project as powering more than 43% of websites across the Web.
The blog had escaped its original category.
So who invented blogging?
There is no clean answer.
If the question is "Who created one of the earliest recognizable personal blogs?", Justin Hall is one of the strongest answers.
If the question is "Who created an early technology-oriented weblog?", Dave Winer is one of the important names.
If the question is "Who coined the word weblog?", the answer is Jorn Barger.
If the question is "Who shortened weblog to blog?", the answer is Peter Merholz.
If the question is "Who made blogging easy for ordinary Internet users?", services such as Blogger, LiveJournal and other early platforms deserve much of the credit.
If the question is "Who built one of the most influential open-source blogging platforms?", the answer is Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little with WordPress.
And if the question is "Who invented blogging as we know it today?", the honest answer is that nobody did it alone.
The history of blogging is really the history of personal publishing
There is a tendency to look at the history of the Internet as a sequence of companies and products.
ARPANET.
The Web.
Netscape.
Google.
Facebook.
Twitter.
But blogging tells a different story.
It is largely a story about individuals.
People who wanted to write.
People who wanted to share links.
People who wanted to keep diaries.
People who wanted to publish without asking permission.
People who wanted to build communities around their interests.
The technology kept getting easier, but the basic idea remained surprisingly stable.
I have something to say, and I want to put it on the Web.
That was the fundamental idea behind the earliest personal homepages.
It was there in the first weblogs.
It was there in Blogger and LiveJournal.
It was there in WordPress.
It survived the rise of social media.
And it is still there every time somebody buys a domain, opens a text editor and publishes something of their own.
From 1994 to today
The evolution is easier to understand as a sequence:
- 1990s personal homepages: people learn that they can publish themselves on the Web.
- 1994: Justin Hall begins publishing on Links.net, one of the earliest major examples of personal Web publishing.
- 1997: Jorn Barger uses the term "weblog".
- 1998: services such as Open Diary begin making online journaling more accessible.
- 1999: the word "blog" emerges and services such as Blogger and LiveJournal make publishing easier.
- 2001: Movable Type expands the possibilities of self-hosted blogging.
- 2002: the growing blogosphere gets dedicated search and tracking services such as Technorati.
- 2003: WordPress launches as open-source blogging software.
- Mid-2000s: blogging becomes a mainstream publishing medium.
- Late 2000s: social networks and microblogging begin moving publishing into centralized feeds.
- 2010s: mobile publishing and platforms such as Medium further simplify online writing.
- 2020s: independent websites, newsletters, RSS and platform publishing coexist.
The important part is the last one.
The blog did not really die.
It became infrastructure.
Some of it became social media. Some became newsletters. Some became corporate publishing. Some became news sites. Some became documentation. Some became video channels. And some are still just small websites maintained by one person.
That may be the most interesting thing about blogging's history.
It started as an experiment in putting personal writing on the Web.
Thirty years later, the basic idea is still here.
The tools changed.
The platforms changed.
The business models changed.
The word itself changed.
But the fundamental act of publishing something under your own name on the Internet never really went away.
Sources and further reading
- Links.net, Justin Hall's personal website.
- RSS History, Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.
- RSS 2.0 Specification, Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.
- WordPress History, WordPress.org.
- WordPress Now Available, the original 2003 WordPress announcement.
- Learn about WordPress origins and version history, WordPress.org.
- The History of the Web, W3C.
- Blogger, the publishing platform originally created by Pyra Labs.
- LiveJournal.
- Medium.
- Justin Hall image, Wikimedia Commons.
- Blogger logo, Wikimedia Commons.
- LiveJournal icon, Wikimedia Commons.
- WordPress administration screenshot, Wikimedia Commons.
- Medium logo, Wikimedia Commons.
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