The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997 . The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz . He broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog in April or May of 1999 . [2] "Blog" was accepted as a noun (weblog shortened) and as a verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog").

Justin Hall , who began eleven years of personal "blogging" in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College , is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers. After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity: the site Xanga , launched in 1996, had only 100 diaries by 1997, and over 50 000 000 as of December 2005. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools:

• Open Diary launched in October 1998, soon growing to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries.
• Andrew Smales's sister projects: Pitas.com created in July 1999 (as an easier alternative to maintaining a 'news page' on a website), and Diaryland , created in September 1999 (focusing more on a personal diary community)
• Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan ( Pyra Labs ) launched Blogger.com in August 1999 (purchased by Google in February 2003 )
• Paul Kedrosky 's GrokSoup

As of March 2003 , the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog , weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary.

Dave Winer is one of the pioneers of the tools that make blogs more than merely websites. One of his most significant contributions was setting up servers that weblogs could ping to indicate updates. Gary Winnick

Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier specifically blogrolls and TrackBacks . This enabled bloggers to control the threads that connected them to others with similar interests, thereby wresting control from forum moderators.

Blogging appears The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997 . The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz...

Blogging gains popularity In 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants , news services and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion forming...