Blog

A blog is a website made of dated entries shown newest first. The form grew out of personal home pages and link logs in the mid-1990s; one early example often cited is the student Justin Hall's site, begun in 1994. The writer Jorn Barger coined "weblog" in 1997 for his log of interesting links, and in 1999 the designer Peter Merholz jokingly split the word into "we blog," which stuck.

What made a blog different from a home page was its rhythm. A home page was built and then updated occasionally; a blog was written in small pieces, often daily, and readers came back to see what was new. The newest post sat at the top, and older ones moved into archives sorted by month.

Publishing tools turned it into a mass habit. Before 1999, keeping a blog meant hand-editing HTML and uploading files. Blogger, launched that year, let anyone post from a web form, and Google bought it in 2003. LiveJournal mixed blogging with friends lists. Movable Type and then WordPress, released in 2003, gave writers their own installation of a content management system.

Several conventions came with the form:

• Permalinks, a fixed address for each post, so others could link to an entry instead of a page that kept changing.
• Feeds, which let readers follow many blogs without visiting each one, through formats like RSS.
• Comments and trackbacks: trackbacks notified a blog when another blog linked to it, and together with comments they turned separate sites into conversations; see Backlink.
• Blogrolls, lists of other blogs the author read, which did the job of a Webring one hop at a time.

By the mid-2000s blogs broke news, shaped elections, and launched careers, and the term "blogosphere" described the whole linked network. Merriam-Webster named "blog" its word of the year for 2004.

Openness had a cost. Spammers flooded comment forms with links to raise their sites in search results, a crude form of Search Engine Optimization. In 2005 Google and the major blog platforms introduced a link attribute telling search engines to ignore links in comments.

Much of the energy then moved to social networks, which offered an audience without the work of building one. The posts became shorter, and the platform, not the writer, owned the address. Many personal blogs went quiet, and their old links broke.

Blogs never disappeared. Email newsletters revived long-form writing with built-in delivery, and the IndieWeb movement encourages people to post on their own sites first and syndicate copies elsewhere. Many personal sites now generate their pages from plain text files; see Static Site Generation.