A little history of the "blog"

- A blog started as a kind of combination professional journal and personal diary written online for everybody to read. The term "Blog" comes from the phrase "web log" which caught on just before the year 2000 then someone changed it to "we blog" and the Blog was born!.

1967: The Internet is invented. Most people didn't begin to take notice until 25 years later. As personal computers became more affordable, the internet became popular and in the late 1990's people started to realize the could "publish" their thoughts and ideas on the internet for free.

1998: Open Diary becomes one of the first online tools to assist users in the publishing of online journals. It would later be followed by other journaling tools, including LiveJournal (1999), DiaryLand (1999), Pitas (1999), Blogger (1999), Xanga (2000), Movable Type (2001) and Wordpress (2003). All of these formats allowed people without codeing or programming expeirience to create their own internet based pages with info and pictures.

2002: Bloggers focus their attention on comments made by Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) at a birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) that appear to endorse segregation. After intense coverage in the blogosphere, the story spreads throughout the media, forcing Lott to resign his leadership position in the Senate. This was the 1st major media story that started with a blog and gave blogging credibility as an information source not just peoples ramblings

2003: Public radio host Christopher Lydon publishes mp3 audio files on a Web site, using an RSS feed developed by Dave Winer so people could subscribe to them. Then, Ben Hammersley, in an article for the UK Guardian newspaper, describes the technique used by Lydon, Winer and others as "podcasting." And in early 2004, Videographer Steve Garfield launches his video blog and declares 2004 "The Year of the Video Blog," Leading to the future technology crazes such YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter (which was 1st described as "micro-blogging"