A short History of Blogs

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December 1997: Jorn Barger invents the term ”weblog” to descrbe his own website

December 1998: An inventory of all known weblogs is taken; it tallies all of 23 sites

April 1999: Peter Merholz coins the shorter term ”blog”

August 1999: Pyra Labs launches Blogger, a free blog-hosting service

October 2001: Six Apart releases Movable Type for making blogs

December 2002: Political bloggers drive Trent Lott from US Senate majority leader post over allegedly racist comments

February 2003: Google buys Pyra Labs and its blogger.com; becomes the world’s top blog host

March 2003: The Oxford English Dictionary lists blog as a noun and a verb

September 2003: Worldwide blog count soars to 1m

August 2004: Bloggers are cleared to cover US political conventions

May 2005: Blogosphere explodes to 10m blogs

September 2005: Google introduces blog search features

November 2005: Blogosphere double in size again; at 20m outposts.

This information was obtained from Forbes.