Origin of Blogging sites

It has become quite common that everyone will like to be associated with the computer and internet world in one or the other way. In the last few years blogging has gained lot of prominence, everyone like to write blogs and update it or read it regularly. Blogging has become similar to writing personal diary daily but in blogging you will update on internet. It gained so much popularity in the today’s web world that all celebrities have updated their daily routines on one or the other blog site. Have any one made any survey or give a thought how blogging has started?

These questions were haunting me much, who might have started blogging? What was the purpose or reason behind starting such web sites on which others can write, read or share? I searched through lot of internet content for getting answers to these. In this blog I will write brief history of origin of blogs.

The first available evidence of blogging is the blog created by Justin Hall in the name Links.net when he was a college student in 1994. The term blogging was not coined at that time and his writings were referred as personal homepage or personal online diary. In the year 1997 the term ‘weblog’ was coined by Jorn Barger and later in 1999, Peter Merholz broke the word ‘weblog’ into ‘we blog’, in a small duration of time there after Evan Williams of Pyra Labs used the word ‘blog’ as both a noun and verb. In verbal meaning ‘to blog’ is ‘to edit one’s weblog or post to one’s weblog’. Starting from 1997 many companies came with idea of blogging and gained much popularity in 1999 because of availability of advanced tools for blogging.

Some of the prominent ones are:

• Open Diary was started by Bruce Ableson in October 1998
• Live Journal was started by Brad Fitzpatrick in March 1999
• Pitas.com was started by Andrew Smales in July 1999
• Blogger.com was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan in August 1999. The term ‘Blogger’ was coined by Evan Williams for the product launched by the Pyra Labs, which had option for writing blogs. Blogger.com was purchased by Google in the year 2003 looking at the features and popularity of blogger.com.

In the initial developmental stage political leaders made use of Blog sites but now the scenario is changed, blogging sites have become popular and showing an exponential growth in the last few years making blogging sites not only restricted to political blogs.