The History of Weblogs

The first weblog began at the “Dawn of Internet Time”, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website while working at CERN (Blockstar). In 1991 when Berners-Lee published the first website, it contained a running list in which he documented all new emerging websites (Wikipedia). Thus, weblogging was born.

The earliest weblogs were very different from the majority of weblogs today. The weblog of Sir Tim Berners-Lee was precisely what the title suggests: a “log” of the “web”. It was more of a running list than the creative content-driven blogs we have come to know today. As more weblogs began to emerge slowly over the next few years, they followed in the tradition of the first blog and primarily offered links to other internet sites.

Following Berners-Lee, a company called NCSA continued the tradition of weblogging with their “What’s New” list, which became the oldest archived list of websites (Blockstar). In June 1993, Netscape created “What’s New” which listed internet resources as they appeared each month. In her article “Weblogs: A History and Perspective”, Rebecca Blood notes that, “the original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays” (Blood). In the following year, more websites and blogs would develop that were very similar to the What’s New list, in that they simply provided an index of the websites and blogs throughout the web.

Still, weblogs were fairly inaccessible to the majority of the public. Throughout the early 90’s, there were few developments in self-publishing technology. As a result, it was often the case that “weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts”
(Blood).

However, in 1994, a student named Justin Hall started “Justin's Links from the Underground”, which has become commonly known as the first personal weblog. Speaking of his website, Justin writes “I started a web site to detail my questions about life in an era of increasing connection. On Justin Links, I wrote about my life, my family, my lovers, my pain and my penis. I helped other people share their minds in the space that became journals and blogs and personal web sites” (Hall). Justin kept his weblog running for over 11 years and it has become known as the site which started personal weblogging. His experiment in sharing over the internet helped lead weblogs away from link-driven sites, and closer to the form of blogging we know today.

In 1999, weblogging exploded. A website called Pitas.com released the first build your own blog tool, and weblogging was suddenly available to anyone with a computer and internet access (Blockstar). Pitas made blogging unbelievably simple; after a person registered with their free service, they could select a standard template for their blog, and simply fill out a basic form each time they updated. Pitas would take care of the rest (Pitas). Coincidently, I created my first weblog using the Pitas website in 1999, and it is the blog I use to this day.

Later that year, a similar service called Blogger was released, which became the “most popular web based blogging tool to date”(Blockstar). Once these free weblog tools started launching the immense popularity of weblogging was visible all around. Suddenly high school students and internet enthusiasts’ blogs were popping up all over the place. Weblogging exploded. Blood writes, “the promise of the web was that everyone could publish, that a thousand voices could flourish, communicate, connect. The truth was that only those people who knew how to code a web page could make their voices heard. Blogger, Pitas, and all the rest have given people with little or no knowledge of HTML the ability to publish on the web” (Blood). It was only a matter of time until politicians, celebrities, and even news outlets would join the ranks.