Blogger
Millions of people describe themselves as bloggers, and it means different things to different people.
Years ago, it referred to people who owned websites on which they posted stories and articles on their areas of expertise, but, lately, it also refers to people who regularly post content on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Last week, I asked four people who describe themselves as "Bloggers" if they knew the word's origin, but none of them had any clue. Some thought it is an old English word meaning informal journalist.
The word "blog" grew out of the word "weblog" that Jorn Barger coined in 1997. Barger owned Robot Wisdom, a website on which he published essays on history, culture, and technology.
"Log" is an English word meaning a record of day-to-day activities.
In 1997, Barger started posting on the Robot Wisdom daily lists (or log) of books and articles he was reading, and he called it the Robot Wisdom Weblog. He used it to direct readers to reading material he considered interesting or informative.
The Robot Wisdom Weblog became so popular that Village Voice described it as "one of the best collections of news and musings culled from the Web".
In 1999, Peter Merholz, who owned a website called peterme.com, adopted Barger's "WebLog" concept for his website, but he shortened its name to "Blog".
The word "Blogger" was was, however, coined by Evan Clark Williams in 2001. Williams owned a website called EvHead.com that he used to keep a daily "WebLog" of his thoughts. It had a huge following, so I realised that there were probably millions of people who wanted to share their private thoughts as he did on EvHead.com but lacked a platform.
He formed a company called Pyra Labs, which created the world's first web application for creating and managing WebLogs. He called the application Blogger, and he gave the name Bloggers to people who used it to share articles and stories.
The application became so successful that, in 2003, Google bought his company and renamed the application blogspot.com.
But Williams wasn't done with creating apps for sharing ideas. In 2006, he and Jack Dorsey founded Twitter.
