Blog is a digital space where you share your ideas and knowledge with the world.
In the early days of Internet, people started sharing their daily life through digital journals or weblogs. It was a time when social media didn’t exist, not even the term. At that time, digital journals were the windows through which you could look at the lives of the writer.
Initially, such websites that served as digital journals or diaries were called weblogs. It eventually came to be popularly known as blogs.
The History of Blog
The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The shorter and prevalent word “blog” came into existence rather unwittingly.
A blogger Peter Merholz played with the word weblog and broke it into “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.
Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used “blog” as both a noun and verb, and coined the term “blogger” for their blogging platform Blogger.com (now owned by Google).
Though the term weblog and blog came into existence in 1997-1999, blogging had started in as early as 1994. One of the pioneer bloggers was a college student. In the origin, most people maintained diaries of their lives on such websites. So, blogs were websites where a person shared his life and thoughts.
Early blogs were simple websites serving as daily journals and were manually updated to publish new entries in a chronological order. So, the early bloggers were people who could write HTML codes so as to be able to update and publish their websites.
Such blog websites were updated by adding the latest entries at the top of the page. Each entry was added at the top so that the latest entry always stay in front. Once the month ended, the file was moved to archive folders and new file replaced as the front page of the website.
The Rise of Blogging Platforms
After many years of blogging through standard hand-coded websites, the era of dynamic content management systems handling the publishing and journaling came into existence.
One of the early blogging platforms was Blogger.com, which was launched in 1999. The company that developed Blogger was originally working on a content management system, not intended to be a blogging platform.
The most popular blogging (and content management system) platform today is WordPress. It started out in 27 May 2003 as a free and open source tool. Though WordPress has a hosted service (free and paid) available at WordPress.com, the rise of WordPress is primarly due to the freedom of downloading and hosting the blog independently.
Anyone can download, modify, and use WordPress content management system freely. This freedom and its ease of use, along with wide community participation, has translated into the platform powering around 35% of the Internet, according to WordPress.org.
The Present
With an epochal change of the World Wide Web, blogging has transformed from its early days.
Now, blogging can be done through self-hosted websites, blog publishing websites, and social media sites. Nobody seems to be editing HTML files and manually maintaining websites for journaling.
Blogs are no longer synonymous with the life journal. Instead, blogs are now used to disseminate news, views and knowledge. Both individuals and businesses use blogs alike.
Most blogs today are more about sharing knowledge and experience with some specific objective. You have blogs about fashion, beauty, lifestyle, technology, gadgets, automobiles and just about any other niche you can think of. Blogs can be seen like independent publications or small-team newspapers. One person or a small group handles and manages content and the website platform.
People don’t really journal their daily lives on blogs. Instead, they use social media platforms for sharing life events. Instead of fun activity, blogging is work for many. For professional bloggers, blogs help bring home the bacon.