Origins of Weblogs, Blogs, and Business Blogs

The term Weblog in its current sense of web-diary or journal, is attributed to Jorn Barger and dates way back to December 1997. It was Peter Merholz who condensed the name to blog, in April or May of 1999. Since the term weblog has also been used for the server access logs for websites, the shorter blog has become the most popular term for this form of online journaling.

1999. That was the year blogging really took off, though I'm not sure if the noun 'blog' had evolved into the verb 'blogging' yet at that time, some people were already referring to the blog author's as bloggers.

Early in 1999 Cameron Barrett published a list of all the known blogs at that time -- all 23 of them! His blog CamWorld is one of the few to have archives going all the way back to 1997. Early posts were mostly one-liners, often with a link to a site of interest. Posts frequency is sporadic, and length gradually increases -- especially after a long hiatus a lengthy message seems to be guilt-inspired for not posting for a while.

It was 1999 that software began to appear to facilitate blogging, and with it came the arguments over just what constituted a blog. That discussion continues to this day, with no consensus. In December 2004 Meriam-Webster declared blog the word of the year for 2004, and defined it as:

a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

Note the personal journal part -- by this definition there is no such thing as a business blog, no collaborative blogs, and many political blogs wouldn't qualify as real blogs.

Wikipedia takes a mechanistic approach, defining weblog as "... a web application ..." True, most blogs today are powered by some sort of content management software, but that was not always the case, as many early blogs were hand-coded using simple templates. Nor is the rest of the Wikipedia definition much better, such as "... contains periodic posts on a common webpage ..." -- many sites operate this way, but others only have headlines and/or short descriptions on the main page and full posts are reached through links.

Other definitions have emphasized that blog posts must be dated, or should be in an informal 'journal' style, or must have hyperlinks to other sites, must be ordered chronologically with newest items 'on top' etc. etc.

a Blog as a public internet journal maintained by an individual who obviously has no shame.

So, with no consensus on what a blog is, none-the-less they flourished. Most popular at first were short posts of commentary or description with a link to another site. Later, some blogs became more journal-like, with long posts describing the activities or thoughts of the blogger, often with few or no external links.

Using some of the rough estimates found and the net, and rounding those numbers out, here are my very rough estimates for the growth in the number of blogs:
25 blogs Jan 1999
3,000 blogs Jan 2000
12,000 blogs Jan 2001
50,000 blogs Jan 2002
250,000 blogs Jan 2003
1,500,000 blogs Jan 2004
10,000,000 blogs Jan 2005

Of course, the vast majority of those are no longer active. Most wanna-be bloggers soon lose enthusiasm for the repeated effort, and stop posting after a few days, weeks or months.

As blogs grew in number, so did the options for creating and hosting them, the features offered, and the jargon describing it all. All blogs together form the 'blogosphere.' A controversy or large spate of messages on one topic in the blogosphere is a 'blogstorm.' Of course a 'blogger' needs to 'ping' using 'trackback' and should have a 'permalink' to posts so the 'rss feed' or 'atom feed' using 'xml' will continue to work. You might want to join a 'blogring' or change your 'blog skin' to increase your popularity. A 'blogad' could help your revenue, but not if all your hits are from 'blogbots.' Which 'bloghost' do you prefer? Is it listed on your 'blogroll?' And on and on it goes ... from blogalot to bloggywood.

In 2004 businesses began to take blogs seriously, with many major corporations starting their own blogs, and small businesses embracing the technology with fervor. Many long-time bloggers claimed the newcomers were not really blogging, since their posts were commercially motivated. Despite such protests, business blog is now a well established region of the blogosphere. Some are forums for posting articles like the one you are reading, others follow the original pattern of linking to other sites and providing comments for those links. For larger corporations, the blog is often used to provide news and progress reports that are of interest to customers and shareholders.

Some believe that 2005 will be the year when business blogging becomes the norm for businesses of all sizes. It is sufficiently ill-defined to be all things to all people, so each business can make of it what they will -- an announcement platform, a company news syndication tool, or an advertising medium.

In our next post we look at how we view business weblogs -- their strengths and weaknesses, uses and abuses. Of course we consider this simple format being used here the solustion to many of the problems with traditional blogging programs when used for business blogs!

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