The first blog started? In 1993 by Rob Palmer.
Right around the time Bill Clinton was being inaugurated as the President of the United States and Beanie Babies were making their debut, Rob Palmer, the self-described world’s first blogger, and digital nomad started what was essentially a blog for a communications company he’d been hired by in London.
When was the first blog started? In 1993 by Rob Palmer.
Side note: There are actually multiple competing claims about who the world’s first blogger is, so it’s a matter of dispute and likely impossible to conclusively verify.
Either way, this first or very early online journal (aka blog) was only made up of plain text—there were no graphics or fancy formatting, but this very first incarnation of a blog did something important. It had the ability to spread ideas.
This blog, which is quite possibly the world’s first, showed that the Internet was teeming with potential. You can hear all about the world’s first blog by listening to my interview with Rob from earlier this year. It’s quite an interesting tale of what it was like learning how to make a website in those early days.
1994: The Founding Father of Personal Bloggers Starts (Over)Sharing
In 1994, then 19-year-old Justin Hall began sharing the dirty details of his personal life on his website, Justin’s Links From the Underground.
Of course, at this time, it wasn’t called a blog at all. His website mostly consisted of a list of links (hence the name) with some intermittent text woven in throughout. You can learn more about his story by watching his film, overshare.
It wasn’t actually until ten years after his Internet debut, that the New York Times dubbed Hall the “founding father of personal bloggers.”
1997: The Term “Weblog” is Coined
Believe it or not, the word “blog” actually has a very logical origin.
What’s the origin of the word blog? While most people call it a blog, the term is short for weblog. A weblog is a log—or written documentation—that’s published on the World Wide Web. Put those two ideas together, and you get the term weblog.
Early American blogger, Jorn Barger, is credited as the person who came up with the word. Prior to that, people called blogs things like “online journals” or “online diaries.” The term “weblog” has certain brevity and charm to it, and it wasn’t long before it became shortened even further to “blog.” Read even more in my article about What is a Blog?
2004: “Blog” Becomes the Word of the Year
Every year since 2003, Merriam-Webster has published a list of words that seem particularly relevant to the year in question. Recent words of the year lately have included “justice,” “feminism,” and “surreal.”
In 2004, however, the most looked-up word of the year on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary was “blog.”
This is significant because it showed how much blogging was impacting the mainstream world.
Rather than automatically tuning in to news stations or opening a newspaper, Americans were beginning to turn to their favorite blogs for the content (and even news updates) they were craving.
As we all know now, this has ended in pretty mixed results. A lot of important news that doesn’t make it to the mainstream outlets can be distributed through blogs (and on Twitter), but so can a lot of fake and potentially damaging, misleading news.
2005: Vlogging Happened (YouTube Launches)
In 2005, YouTube officially launched, and while it didn’t happen right away, the platform set the stage for what would become the modern vlog.
What is a vlog? A video-based blog.
2006: HuffPo and BuzzFeed Blur the Lines Between Blogs and News
While some had been looking at blogs and taking them as seriously as they the largest news outlets for years by this point, 2006 brought a new age with the launches of Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.
What, really, is the difference between a blog and a news site? These platforms had the look and feel of a mainstream news site, but glancing through some of the “articles,” many were written as editorial content, fun listicles and explorations into other creative blog post ideas writers wanted to try out with their growing blog audiences. These sites also mastered the art of teaching their journalists how to write a headline that’s designed to capture reader attention.
2007: Microblogging Becomes a Thing
In late 2006, ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse suggested to his readers that they keep their blog post length short enough to allow the average reader to get through it in about a minute and a half. It was also around this time that a little known blogger, Tim Ferriss started his blog to drum up press for his upcoming book, The 4-Hour Workweek.
If the average person reads 200 or 250 words per minute, this would mean that the ideal blog post during this period of time may have been somewhere between 300 and 400 words. That’s pretty short by today’s standards. But, if short was good, then ultra-short must have been better, right?
A new era in the history of blogging, called microblogging, had begun.
At this point, Twitter (then called Twttr) had been humming along for about a year, but it finally took off and became explosively popular in 2007. How much could you really say in 140 characters, (which was the limit at the time)? Enough, apparently, because the site is still wildly successful over a decade later.
2012: Medium is Founded
In 2012, while you were learning the dance to Gangnam Style, Medium was launching.
This online publishing platform (that now has some paywalled content), was wide open to all for the first few years of its life. There are both professional and amateur writers publishing their blog posts on Medium, and similar to BuzzFeed and HuffPo, it tends to blur the line between news and opinion.
The medium gave yet another outlet to social journalists who wanted to make their mark, find a target audience online and grow their communities.
2016: WordPress Launches the .blog Domain
Blogging had become so popular by 2016, that WordPress decided to add the domain extension .blog to its list of possible blog URLs.
This meant that in addition to the original six (at the time) domain extensions in popular use, which included .com, .net, and .org, people and organizations could now choose a domain name with the .blog extension.
This move opened up many new domain options and highlighted the popularity of blogging.
2021: There are Over 31.7 Million Bloggers in the U.S. Alone The history of blogging will never be over… and even better, you can still become a part of it (along with 31.7 Million+ other bloggers in the U.S. alone). Whether you’re brand new at blogging or you’ve been trying your hand at it for a while and just haven’t quite gotten to where you want to be, I’ve compiled my ultimate guide to starting a blog as a completely free resource that’ll help achieve your goals when it comes to making money with your blog this year—whether from landing some paid blogging jobs or by selling your own products (like writing an eBook, creating your own blogging courses or selling blogging books to an audience eager to learn your craft). My guide will teach you everything from how to write a blog post, to creatively naming a blog, choosing the right monthly hosting plan for your blog, implementing intelligent blog SEO strategies, and more. Don’t let another year go by without staking out your own corner in the history of blogging.
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