What is a Blog?

Lots of people think blogs are just a kind of online diary, but that’s underestimating the reach and impact of professionally managed blogs. Bloggers of all kinds – solo entrepreneurs, companies, artists, lifestyle influencers – have become an integral part of social media and online marketing. If you want to establish new online customer bases and build customer loyalty, starting a blog is a great idea. Blogs: Definition and history Blogs are online journals where content on specific or general topics is published for a community of readers at regular intervals. Most blogs are run by one person – the blogger – and are hosted on a website or blogging platform. Other blogs are managed by a team of authors, and posts are written by different bloggers each time. The word blog comes from the earlier term “weblog”, which Peter Merholz jokingly shortened to “we blog”. Like so much in the universe of the World Wide Web, weblogs originated at the CERN nuclear research facility in Geneva. Although blogs, or weblogs, were not common at the time, on August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the HTTP protocol, started the first website and connected users all around the world using the first web clients and servers. He, therefore, laid the foundations for bloggers. Thanks to sites on the World Wide Web, internet resources, new scientific publications, and links could be easily published, shared, and linked together for the first time. As to who created the first ever blog, that’s as difficult a question to answer as “Who wrote the first diary?” It is generally believed that the first private online journals emerged in the mid-1990s. The forefather of blogging is held to be Justin Hall, who shared information about the growing digital world and personal anecdotes from his everyday life in an online diary called “Justin’s Links from the Underground”.