What is a Blog Anyway? Let’s start with the basics

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What is a Blog Anyway?
Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a blog?

The word “blog” is a contraction of “weblog”—that’s “web log” not “we blog”!

The earliest blogs were online diaries, or logs, beginning in 1993. During the rest of the 1990s, personal blogging gradually became popular, with the term “weblog” being coined in 1997. Before that, what we now call blogs bahamas telemarketing data called online journals or online diaries.

Up until 1998, bloggers needed a lot of technical skills. But in 1998, The Open Diary launched. It was the first blogging platform, and it was followed in 1999 by Blogger and LiveJournal—both of which are still going strong today.

WordPress came on the scene in 2003, built by two college students, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. After that, things moved fast:

2003 – Blogs started to be monetized through ads, with Google’s newly launched AdSense
2004 – “Blog” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year
2005 – YouTube and video blogging began
2006 – Huffington Post and BuzzFeed launched, bringing together news (factual content) and blogging (opinion-based content)
2007 – Twitter (and “micro-blogging”) took off
2009 – The White House launched its blog
2012 – Medium was launched, offering another way for bloggers to publish content online
2015 – LinkedIn’s blogging platform, Pulse, became available to all users
2016 – WordPress launched the “.blog” domain extension
If you’re interested in learning more about how blogging has evolved, I’ve got a whole article on the history of blogging.

Today, there are over 31.7 million bloggers just in the U.S. alone. Blogging has come a long way since the early days of online diaries. Today, bloggers can be found:

Writing for big companies and organizations
Marketing their existing small business
Creating and monetizing a blog from scratch
Using blogging as a creative outlet
Writing news articles or opinion pieces
Working for multiple blogs and websites as a freelancer
… and much more. Maybe you want to do one (or more) of those things, or perhaps you have something else in mind entirely. There are lots of great reasons to start blogging, so let’s dig into what you might have in mind.