If you take a look at my website's homepage, you'll note that it's titled "Brennan's Weblog." This is my attempt to pay homage to the original portmanteau—web log, which only became "blog" in April 1999, when programmer Peter Merholz jokingly shortened the word on his site Peterme.com by breaking it into the phrase "we blog." Because we do, don't we?

"I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee-blog. Or "blog" for short."

This seems like it would be the origin point of the word, but that's far from the case. I would be remiss if I began the history of blogging somewhere in the 1980s, because that only explains the "web" part and not the "log" part. For that, we need to go back much further.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this begins in the maritime tradition with a literal, wooden log:

In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes [sic]” in order to measure the ship’s speed.[2] (The length was eventually counted by literal knots tied in the line at regular intervals; thus, our equally iconic term “knots.”) Recordings of the log-derived information, eventually replaced by the “chip log,” a weighted wooden quadrant, were entered into what would come to be called the “log board.”
— Janet Sorenson, "Logging-In: The Ship's Log as Medium"

A log board helped sailors record a ship's speed and direction hour by hour before writing them into the permanent official logbook. This was an instrument of navigation, a tool for cataloguing the wind and weather as much as figuring out your location during a voyage within the endless blue horizon of an unforgiving saltwater sea.

The term "log" moved from maritime use to broader record-keeping during the 19th and 20th centuries as the practice of writing details in a ship's logbook was adopted by other industries. Engineers, scientists, and aviators utilized the same style of sequential, chronological record-keeping.

"Flight logs have been around as long as aviation itself. The Wright brothers kept detailed notebooks, recording dispassionately the results of their experiments in building the first airplane."
— Tom LeCompte, "The Book of Hours"

This transition established the log as more of a default structure for recording events over time, regardless of context. The log became a way of thinking about information.

When looking at the transition to computer systems, you'd think that this is the point where we begin talking about web logs—but that would be missing several decades of additional history.

It was the start of the 1960s when "logging on" to computers entered the nomenclature. As in, the computing sense of "gain access to a secure machine or system" and shares the same etymological roots.

"Whether it was CTSS or a similar system, I envision an engineer, probably at MIT, somewhere between 1959 and 1961, needing to describe a new user command for the system they were creating. We get a lot of neologisms from these situations, and it’s very possible log in dates from just this moment in history."
— James Reffell, "The Secret History of Log In"

"Logging on" came from centuries of logs as the place where action met record.

It took all the way until 1997 for the "web log" to finally make its debut, thanks to essayist and (shocker) blogger Jorn Barger:

"Blogs have come a long way since Dec. 17, 1997, when Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" to describe the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that "logged" his internet wanderings. In the decade hence, blogs have come to dominate the net, from 100 million personal diaries to the breaking news sections of the august *The New York Times."
— Jenna Wortham, "After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future's Brighter Than Ever"

But, really, the actual first blogs simply were not called web logs and were more well-known as online diaries at the time. Justin Hall, someone I've referenced in previous articles, began eleven years of personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College.

"For 11 years, Justin Hall was dedicated to documenting his life online. Composing more than 4,800 pages from nearly a decade of constant writing, which he posted on his site, www.links.net, Hall became a pioneer among online diarists and Web loggers."
— Reyhan Harmanci, "Time to get a life -- pioneer blogger Justin Hall bows out at 31"

And if you ask the Encyclopedia Britannica, it'll tell you that the first blog was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. Who counts as the true first blogger depends on whether your definition is a web log of links, an online diary, or simply a regularly updated personal page.

Online journal writing was novel. There was the new, strange intimacy of writing for an audience you couldn't see. A paper diary is written for the self and usually hidden in the back of a drawer. A weblog is written for the self as well, but published to the world. The tension between private reflection and public performance has defined the act of blogging ever since. In fact, in order to distinguish web journal authors from keepers of traditional paper-and-ink diaries, one of the terms created was the adorable "escribitionist" by Erin Venema in 1999.

Also in 1999, entrepreneurs Ev Williams and Meg Hourihan (who knew Merholz personally in San Francisco, the guy who made the word blog, remember?) launched Blogger.com out of their startup Pyra Labs. Williams is generally credited as the one who popularized turning "blog" into a verb ("to blog") and coined "blogger" as the person doing it, cementing the noun/verb/agent-noun family we use today.

And decades later, Williams would go on to found Medium.com, the platform where I currently make my living. He created the site in 2012 to provide a clean, simple space for thoughtful, long-form writing alternative to the 140-character limit of Twitter.

After taking this journey, I'm rather thankful this is a rare occasion where the origins of a word and its lineage are surprisingly straightforward and easy to research and cite.

Where We Are Now

We're a quarter-way through the 21st century, where does blogging stand today? Well, if you're a so-called hustler trying to find a niche to gameify SEO in order to make passive income, you're probably a lot better off making short-form video content instead.

But the blogosphere itself is incredibly healthy and thriving. There are over 600 million blogs in 2026. It seems like I'm in the 14% minority of bloggers that post +2,000 words per entry.

Blogging is one of the most powerful forms of expression in human history. A modern digital parallel to the 15th-century printing press, scaling the democratization of ideas from physical mass production to instant global reach.

There are no gatekeepers, no barriers to entry. Anyone with an internet connection can publish their thoughts for free on platforms or very low cost on their own. And unlike static print, blogs enable two-way conversations through comments and instant updates.

In the early days, blogs were a destination you checked, the site you visited. Today, the blog is no longer the default for sharing things on the Internet; it's much more of a choice now. And choosing a blog means choosing a space you control, a format that allows for depth, and a record that remains yours.

We've come a long way since the sailors throwing logs into the ocean's waters, since the loglines and logbooks, since Justin's Links—and we're all still doing the same things: marking time, noting where we've been, and leaving a record for whoever comes after. And we all have an opportunity in this thin slice of human history where any of us can write and publish whatever we like to the world. I'm exercising that right, are you?