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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