Weblogsky: "Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime"

"Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime"

Peter Merholz gets credit for reducing "weblog" to "blog," as in "we blog." But who came up with the term weblog in the first place? Jorn Barger, most likely, with his Robot Wisdom Weblog. Paul Boutin describes a recent close encounter with Barger.

Barger crossed over from Usenet to the Web in 1997 and set up his own site, which he dubbed the Robot Wisdom Weblog. He began logging his online discoveries as he stumbled on them - hence "weblog." I barely understood what he was talking about, and still I read him giddily. Barger gave a name to the fledgling phenomenon and set the tone for a million blogs to come. Robot Wisdom bounced unapologetically from high culture to low, from silly to serious, from politics to porn.

jon posted this at 10:24 PM
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Comments

it was originally "Website log" not "we blog" (which makes no sense anyway)
"blog" being just a shorthand version.. like saying W3
weblogs are as old as people putting their entire tape or cd collection online and then writing about a new one, which happened around the time of personal home pages, thus Mosaic started this.. However, before I remember reading science logs online via WAIS

*sigh* suppose I am showing my age.

Posted by: ummm.. | July 9, 2005 11:19 AM

Peter Merholz coined the term "blog" after playing with the word weblog, transforming it to "we blog." See http://www.wordsources.info/words-mod-blogPt1.html for more detail.

Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky | July 9, 2005 8:23 PM