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Dedicated sites for online personal journals and diaries which existed before large-scale blogging platforms are considered to be one of the first true forms of blogging. Before the mainstream usage of the words ‘weblog’, ‘blog’, ‘blogging’ and ‘bloggers’, people who kept their online journals updated called themselves journalers (variations include journallers, journalists), diarists or escribitionists.
Considered to be the pioneer of modern blogging is Justin Hall, currently a freelance journalist. He began posting his day-to-day experiences in detail on his site in 1994 while working as a student intern. Anyone who could access his site could freely browse through his personal photos uploaded on his site and his previous posts.
Open Diary, founded in the October of 1998, is one of the oldest online diary hosts. It pioneered the first commenting system on web diaries, allowing visitors to share their opinions about individual posts.
Jorn Barger, another early diarist, coined the term ‘weblog’ in 1997. Peter Merholz split this word up into ‘we’ and ‘blog’ in early 1999. Numerous blog hosts and platforms also sprung up at around the same time, most notably LiveJournal (created by Brad Fitzpatrick) and Blogger (set up by Pyra Labs, acquired by Google in Febuary 2003).
With the arrival of easy-to-use blogging platforms which offer technologies such as permalinks and archives creation and commenting systems, more and more people has taken to blogging, contributing to the blogging explosion starting in 2001.
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