Blogging Historical Timeline

This historical overview of blogs is part of a set of blogging resources for students and faculty.

1990s

• January 1994
  Swarthmore student Justin Hall launches Links.net, a prototypical link blog, long before the form had a name.
• April 1997
  Dave Winer launches ScriptingNews, which contains both commentary and link posts.
• December 1997
  Online diarist Jorn Barger coins the term “Weblog”.
• August 1998
  The Charlotte Observer uses a blog format to report on Hurricane Bonnie; this is the first known use of the form for reporting breaking news.
• 1999
  The Poynter Institute hires Jim Romenesko to produce the “MediaNews” blog.
• March 1999
  Netscape releases the first RSS specification.
• April 1999
  Brad Fitzpatrick launches LiveJournal. In January 2005, Six Apart (6A) would purchase Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal. In December 2007, 6A would sell LiveJournal to SUP Fabrik, a Russian media company.
• April or May 1999
  Programmer Peter Merholz shortens “Weblog” to “blog.”
• July 1999
  MetaFilter launches.
• August 1999
  Pyro lags releases Blogger, the first popular, free blog-creation service. The founders would eventually launch Twitter.
• Late 1999
  Dave Winer introduces Edit This Page.

2000-2003

• January 2000
  BoingBoing.net, the blog, is born; the zine was born in 1988.
• June 2000
  Dave Winer releases an RSS spec that is not compatible with Netscape.
• November 2000
  Josh Marshall launches TalkingPointsMemo.
• October 2001
  SixApart launches Movable Type, a blog publishing system. In December 2007, MT would be recast as free software under the GNU General Public License.
• 2002
  Analysts estimate the universe at 500,000 blogs.
• February 2002
  Google buys Blogger.
• February 2002
  Heather Armstrong is fired for discussing her job on her blog, Dooce. “Dooced” becomes a verb: “Fired for blogging.”
• June 2002
  BlogAds testing begins. The company launched in August.
• August 2002
  Nick Denton launches Gizmodo, the first in what will become a blog empire.
• August 2002
  Blogads launches, the first broker of blog advertising.
• October 2002
  The Christian Science Monitor implements an RSS feed for the entire newspaper.
• December 2002
  Josh Marshall and other political bloggers, such as Atrios and Glenn Reynolds, highlight Trent Lott’s racially charged comments; 13 days later, Lott resigns from his post as Senate majority leader.
• December 2002
  Nick Denton launches Gawker, feeding off the human propensity to gossip.
• Late 2002
  The RSS-Dev Working Group releases RSS 1.0.
• 2003
  AOL implements a version of blogging.
• 2003
  WordPress starts, based upon “a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.” In June 2010, WordPress.com hosted 11.4 million blogs and there were another 13.8 million that used WordPress.org software.
• March 2003
  Salam Pax, an anonymous Iraqi blogger, gains worldwide audience during the Iraq war.
• June 2003
  Google launches AdSense, matching ads to blog content.
• August 2003
  The first avalanche of ads on political blogs.
• September 2003
  Jason Calacanis founds Weblogs, Inc., which will grow to a portfolio of 85 blogs before being purchased by AOL in October 2005 for $25-30 million.
• October 2003
  SixApart launches Typepad, a premium hosted blogging service based on MovableType software.

2004-

• January 2004
  Nick Denton launches Wonkette.
• December 2004
  Merriam-Webster declares “blog” the “Word of the Year.”
• January 2005
  Study finds that 32 million Americans read blogs.
• May 2005
  The Huffington Post launches.
• December 2005
  An estimated $100 million worth of blog ads are sold this year.
• December 2005
  Atom 1.0, a syndication alternative to RSS, is released for comment.
• January 2006
  Andrew Sullivan moves his blog, The Daily Dish, to AOL-Time-Warner.
• February 2006
  The Huffington Post, launched in 2005, becomes the fourth most-linked-to blog.
• October 2006
  SixApart launches Vox, a hosted blogging service focused on social networking and multimedia integration. It folded in September 2010.
• February 2007
  A blog is created every second.
• March 2007
  Tumblr.com launched: “tumblelogging … is to weblogs what text messages are to email – short, to the point, and direct.”
• December 2007
  Full integration: 95% of U.S. newspapers feature reporter blogs.
• July 2008
  Pew:  “33% of internet users (the equivalent of 24% of all adults) say they read blogs; 12% of internet users (representing 9% of all adults) say they create or work on their own online journal or blog.”
• October 2009
  Technorati State of the Blogosphere: “Bloggers use Twitter much more than does the general population.”

Resources On Blogging History

• Rebecca Blood: Weblogs, A History (July 2000)
• Kathy Gill: How Can We Measure The Influence Of The Blogosphere (May 2004, pdf)
• Kathy Gill: Blogging, RSS and the Information Landscape – A Look At Online News (May 2005, pdf)
• Jeffry Zeldman: The History of Blogging (April 2009)