An empty WordPress blog template, 2010
20 July 2026
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?
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.
Sources:
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. 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.
