The History of Blogging

Although blogging is a fairly recent invention and is getting more and more popular, its concept is not new at all. Electronic communities had existed long before the internet The AP wire was in many ways much like a large chat room where there were "wire fights" and electronic conversations.

Amateur ham radio operators were also an electronic community, these individuals set up their own equipment for transmitting information in order to communicate directly with others. Interestingly, in the early 1980s ham radio also had blogs called "glogs" that were nothing but personal diaries made using wearable computers.

Digital communities took many forms - Usenet, email lists and bulletin board services. In the 90s internet forum soft ware's created running conversations with threads. The term "thread," in reference to successive messages on one particular topic, comes from email lists and Usenet terminology, and "to post" from electronic bulletin boards, borrowing usage directly from their predecessors. In fact, many of the terms from blogging come from here.

Diarists also kept journals on the internet and most called themselves online diarists, journalists, or journalers. A few called themselves "escribitionists." It is still undecided as to who invented or created the "first" blog. According to Wikipedia, Justin Hall who began his proto-blog in 1994 as a student is often credited with being the first online journalers, and thus the forefather of modern-day blogging.

The origin of the term "weblog" is also uncertain. In December 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term weblog on his own blog. The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in 1999. This interesting play on words became popular and "blog" as a short form not only became a household noun, but also as a verb. Moreover, "to blog" and "blogging" not only came to mean a person editing or making a post to his or her own weblog, but ultimately it became a popular in the English speaking world. Even the Oxford English Dictionary soon included the terms "weblog", "web logging" and "web logger" and in 2004, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary declared "blog" as the word of the year.

In 1998 there were very few sites that were blogs but soon after that, blogs grew in popularity. In a year's time, the total number of blogs was estimated to be around 50, and 5 years later, there were millions.

You can create a blog for any purpose. It may be for your business or just to ventilate your own experience which is in other words your personal blog. Starting a blog is not all. You have to update the blog on a daily basis. Any important happenings of a day can be posted as a blog post. The title you apply to your blog post should be unique. The blog platform can be used for any topic you feel deserving. Business blogs are different. These blogs are used for communicating with the community for which it has been set up. It may contain the information about the products, about the employees, about the dealers and all other connected ones for the promotion of the business.

It has become tremendously popular in the last few years, and some of the biggest and best known blogs attract more visitors than any other industry. Individual blogs are the product of their author's imagination, interest and humor, and it is this personal touch which has made them so popular.