A 450-year History of Blogging

If you take a look at my website's homepage, you'll note that it's titled "Brennan's Weblog." This is my attempt to pay homage to the original portmanteau—web log, which only became "blog" in April 1999, when programmer Peter Merholz jokingly shortened the word on his site Peterme.com by breaking it into the phrase "we blog." Because we do, don't we? "I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee-blog. Or "blog" for short." This seems like it would be the origin point of the word, but that's far from the case. I would be remiss if I began the history of blogging somewhere in the 1980s, because that only explains the "web" part and not the "log" part. For that, we need to go back much further. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this begins in the maritime tradition with a literal, wooden log: In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand…