An empty WordPress blog template, 2010
20 July 2026
[22 July 2026: added discussion of Evan Williams and Pyra Labs]
A blog, as most of you probably know, is a website where a writer posts commentary, reflections, and personal anecdotes. It can also be a portion of a commercial website that provides product updates and commentary. And, as most of you also probably know, blog is a clipping of weblog. Weblogs and blogs became a thing in the closing years of the twentieth century.
There is, however, a slightly older and semantically unrelated sense of web log. That is an automatically produced file that records all traffic to and from a web server. This older sense dates to at least 3 November 1993, when “Web log” appears in the title of a post to the Usenet group comp.infosystems.www.
But the more familiar sense of weblog is in place by 23 December 1997 when Jorn Barger used the term in the URL for his commentary website:
After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News (www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:
URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html
This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture to politics to literature etc.
Appearance in URL is one thing, but weblog appears some nine months later in a Village Voice article of 8 September 1998 that refers to Barger’s website:
Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom WebLog (mcs.net/ -jorn/html/weblogs/weblog.html) might not be pretty, but it's one of the best collections of news and musings culled from the Web-and updated daily
And the clipped form blog appears the next year on 19 May 1999 when writer and web guru Peter Merholz used the term and the term blogger, for one who writes a blog, on his own blog:
Blog coverage continues apace. Scott Rosenberg favorably contrasts bloggers to traditional journalists.
For those keeping score on blog commentary from outside the blog community, there's:
- JonKatz at Freedomforum
- JonKatz at Slashdot
- Dan Gillmor discussing Slashdot
- Smug on weblog-rolling
So when do we inevitably ascend to the next meta level, covering the blog coverage?
In the sidebar to his website, Merholz included the statement that may be an earlier use of blog, “I've decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as wee’- blog. Or ‘blog; for short.” Exactly when he wrote this is uncertain, but it was between 4 May 1999 and 2 March 2000, the bracketing captures on Archive.org.
Merholz is often given credit for coining blog, and that may very well be true. But it seems likely that the word was “in the air” at the time, and Merholz was merely the first person to put it down in writing that survives—and that only because of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine.
Evan Williams is often credited with coining blogger, and as with the claim about Merholz’s coinage of blog, this may be true, but again it is also possible, even likely, that multiple people independently coined the term at about the same time. Williams was co-founder of Pyra Labs, which launched the blogging software product Blogger on 23 August 1999. The domain name blogger.com was registered by Pyra Labs on 22 June 1999. But the tool was in use as an in-house tool for some time before this, so we don’t know exactly when Pyra Labs started using blogger. Whether or not Williams was the first to coin the word, Pyra Labs’s Blogger product greatly contributed to the popularity and spread of the word.
Regardless of who coined the terms, both blog and blogger came into use in the spring of 1999.
Sources:
Baker, John. “Origins of ‘Blog’ and ‘Blogger.’” ADS-L, 20 April 2008.
Barger, Jorn. “Lively New Webpage.” Usenet. comp.ai, 23 December 1997.
Bunn, Austin. “Machine Age: Can the Web Be a Model for Real-World Race Relations?” Village Voice (New York City), 8 September 1998, 33/3. ProQuest Newspapers.
Hughes, Kevin. “Announcing getsites 1.5, a Web log analyzer.” Usenet: comp.infosystems.www, 3 November 1993.
Merholz, Peter. “For What It’s Worth.” Peterme.com, between 4 May 1999 and 2 March 2000. Archive.org.
———. Peterme.com (blog), 28 May 1999. Archive.org.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2003, s.v. blog, n., blog, v.; June 2017, weblog, n.
Image credit: Uusijani, Wordpress.org, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the GNU General Public License.
