Who deserves the title ‘the blog innovator’? Probably no one featured on Forbes’ list of billionaires but a group of people who thought sharing is caring. Prior to the advent of hosted blogs, diarists as they were known had simple websites on which they posted their thoughts and daily happenings. This was in the 1990s, and the word blog hadn’t been ‘invented yet’, so these early practitioners don’t deserve label of ‘blog inventors.The second bunch of fanatics went a step further and gave these websites a name. On 17 December 1997, Jorn barge coined the term weblog to refer to online diaries, but it is Peter Merholz who jokingly on his websites peeterme.com broke the word weblog to we blog and the word blog was born. In August of 1999, Evan Williams was the first to use the word blog as both a noun and a verb meaning to edit an online diary. It didn’t end there, he went further and coined the term blogger to mean a person involved in blogging activities. Better still, in collaboration with Meg Harhan they co founded Pyra Labs which developed Blogger.com that has since been acquired by Google.

 

Slight a year before Evan launched Blogger.com, Bruce Abelson was a head of the pack as he launched Open Diary that saw thousands of online diaries go live within months. He was responsible for a revolutionary feature still present in blogs, the readers’ comment box. This feature was so revolutionary and it is responsible for qualifying blogs as social media. Therefore, the title of ‘blog inventors’ belong to both Evan and Bruce, the former gave it a name while the latter gave birth to the idea of hosted blogs. It is in this era that other blogging sites came up such as Live Journal, perhaps being part of the dot com bubble. As per 13 October 2012, there were 77 million blogs on Tumblr and 56.6 million blogs on Wordpress. Blogging is now part of the urban culture and seems it is here to stay, thank you Evan and Bruce.

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