History of Blogging

The word “blog” is about 450 years older than the web. The lineage runs from ship's logs to flight logs to system logs to weblogs, and the practice (keeping a dated record) is older than all of them.

Adapted from A 450-year History of Blogging on brennan.day.

• 1574: William Bourne's A Regiment for the Sea describes the ship's log: a wooden quadrant thrown overboard on a knotted line, its speed readings entered into the “log board.” The knots give us both the word “log” for records and “knots” for speed. See Janet Sorenson's Logging-In.
• 1903 onward: the Wright brothers kept detailed flight notebooks; flight logs became standard. See The Book of Hours.
• ~1960: computing inherits the term. “Log in” likely dates to an MIT engineer naming a user command on CTSS or a similar system between 1959 and 1961. See The Secret History of Log In and etymonline: log.

• 1992: Tim Berners-Lee's first site at CERN worked like a blog: a dated stream of announcements and links about the web.
• 1994: Justin Hall starts Justin's Links from the Underground and publishes for 11 years: over 4,800 pages. See the SF Gate profile and Interlinking.
• 1997: Jorn Barger coins “weblog” on December 17, 1997 to describe the logged links on his Robot Wisdom site.
• 1999: Peter Merholz shortens “weblog” to “blog” and posts the joke on his homepage; the snapshot survives. The same year, Blogger launches and makes publishing push-button and accessible.
• 2000s: WordPress (2003), then hosted platforms like Medium (2012) move the format onto corporate rails. There are now an estimated 600 million blogs.

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