The Social Media Marketing Book

History

People have been keeping journals for thousands of years (an example is Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius), and have been able to write them online since 1994. Justin Hall, a student at Swarthmore College, was one of the first web diarists when he started writing about video games and gaming conventions in the mid-1990s. Originally, these journals were nothing more than parts of regular sites that were updated regularly, by hand, in HTML. The technical knowledge this required prevented the average person from starting an online diary.

In December 1997, the word weblog, a combination of the words web and log, was born; eventually, weblog was shortened to just blog. This is probably one of the least understood and most ridiculed words on the Web; I've heard people who should know better explain it as having come from a bunch of ridiculous origins (including business log).

Blogging didn't start to blossom until 1999, when LiveJournal (see Figure 2-1) and Blogger were launched, the latter by Evan Williams (who went on to create Twitter). Users could sign up to one of these two sites and start their own blogs for free, with no technical ability required. By the end of 2008, 346 million people were reading blogs, and 184 million had started one of their own.

Figure 2-2. Mashable's "God List" posts took a long time to make, but resulted in thousands of visitors and links.