History

The term “web log” was first coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, a self-publishing author who defined the phrase as “logging the web,” which came from commentating on sites he surfed on the Internet. The term was later condensed in 1999, somewhat accidentally, when another self-publisher, Peter Merholz, wrote the phrase as “we blog,” meant to be nothing more than a play on words. The latter half stuck and came into popular usage shortly thereafter. [1]


The lineage of the blog can be traced back all the way back to the 4th century. St. Augustine is widely credited as the author of the very first Western autobiography, Confessions, in which Augustine of Hippo, a philosopher and theologian, depicts his immoral youth and eventual spiritual journey.

Autobiographies can thus be considered the grandfather of the blog, with its grandchild having much shorter of an attention span. A blog can focus on any modicum of the author’s life, from a bad experience the author had at an airport to what the author had for breakfast that day.

A typical blog could be described as “a personal journal. . . often of the most confessional sort,” which calls to mind the idea of a private diary. [2]  The obvious difference here is that blogs are published, and therefore meant to be seen by the public, though their therapeutic and reflective natures are often connected. [3]

Some appropriately consider blogging to be a form of life-writing, which is described as “the recording of selves, memories and experiences.” [4]  “Subgenres of life-writing include autobiographies, memoirs, confessions, spiritual quests, meditations, personal essays, travelogues, portraits, complaints, conceptual writings, works of humour, and family histories. . . blogging involves all these genres.” [5]  It is also what some blog authors refer to as “thinking by writing,” where the author regulates his or her behavior through connections with their audience. 

The first official blogging service, Open Diary, was created by computer programmer Bruce Ableson, which quickly spawned its more popular successor LiveJournal, but nowadays blogs can be found outside such traditional platforms.


Some bloggers use social networking sites like MySpace to host their free-form journals, while others stick with the more traditional blogging domains like Blogger and Wordpress. Some blogs are contained within a personal web site, some consider the 140-or-less character updates of Twitter to be blogging, and some authors collaborate on community blogs. The options for self-publishing are vast and varied. [6]

Sir Ian McKellen, perhaps known most notably for his role as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, might be the first celebrity to ever write a blog, though McKellen says this was before the term was even put into common use. McKellen started an online journal called The Grey Book (referencing his character Gandalf the Grey) as a way for the actor to “record his impressions” while filming The Lord of the Rings movies. He first posted to The Grey Book on August 20, 1999, to describe his thoughts on the characters he'd played in the past, and the awesome responsibility of playing a character as beloved as Gandalf.

Screen cap taken from http://www.mckellen.com/cinema/lotr/journal.htm.

The trend of celebrity-authored blogs reached its peak around 2005, at least for film and television actors, five years after McKellen’s first entry into The Grey Book. The exact number of celebrity bloggers is difficult to pinpoint because it's hard for researchers to say for sure what constitutes a celebrity as well as what should technically be considered a blog. But estimates rough estimates for the number of active celebrity bloggers has decreased since 2005. [7]  This decrease is possibly due to an overall shift from traditional blogs to Twitter, which may not be accounted for in studies.


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