A blog (a truncation of "weblog")[1] is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, multi-author blogs (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors, sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users who did not have much experience with HTML or computer programming. Previously, knowledge of such technologies as HTML and File Transfer Protocol had been required to publish content on the Web, and early Web users therefore tended to be hackers and computer enthusiasts. As of the 2010s, the majority are interactive Web 2.0 websites, allowing visitors to leave online comments, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.[2] In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking service. Indeed, bloggers not only produce content to post on their blogs but also often build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.[3] Blog owners or authors often moderate and filter online comments to remove hate speech or other offensive content. There are also high-readership blogs which do not allow comments.
log and blogging are now loosely used for content creation and sharing on social media, especially when the content is long-form and one creates and shares content on a regular basis, so one could be maintaining a blog on Facebook or blogging on Instagram. A 2022 estimate suggested that there were over 600 million public blogs out of more than 1.9 billion websites.[4]
History
Main articles: History of blogging and online diary
An early example of a "diary" style blog consisting of text and images transmitted wirelessly in real-time from a wearable computer with head-up display, February 22, 1995
The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger[5] on December 17, 1997. The short form "blog" was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in May 1999.[6][7][8] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.[9]