A post I stumbled onto the other day, A 450-Year History of Blogging by Brennan Kenneth Brown, gave me one of those "huh, wait" moments about halfway through. He traces "blog" all the way back to an actual ship's log, and covers a lot of ground along the way, wordplay, diaries, where blogging stands today. He tells that version well, go read the full thing, it's worth your time.
Two Words Doing Two Different Jobs
It got me thinking about something of my own, though, especially since I was keeping a diary long before I ever kept a blog: blogging's actual idea, the personal part, feels like it owes more to diary and journal writing than to a ship's log. That's not the same as saying it started that way, just that it drifted there. The two words were doing completely different jobs for most of their history.
"Diary" and "journal" go back through Latin, day to daily to "a daily thing," and they're basically siblings, same root, different roads into English. People were keeping this kind of record long before either word meant what it means today, too. Babylonian scribes kept dated, ongoing observations on clay tablets for roughly 600 years, from around 652 BCE to 61 BCE, though the surviving tablets are patchy and few before 400 BCE. The habit is thousands of years older than any word we've used for it.
"Log" took a much simpler path. A ship's log became a logbook by the 1670s. By 1842, it was just "log," and it could mean any dated record. By the 1960s, "log in" meant getting into a shared computer.
I always figured "weblog" was coined as a kind of online diary, since personal writing had already started three years earlier, with Justin Hall sharing his life online in 1994, before the word "weblog" even existed. Turns out I had that backwards. Even before Barger came along, "web log" already meant something technical, server access logs tracking visitor counts, page views, and downloads, nothing personal. When Barger coined "weblog" in 1997, he meant the same kind of thing: a log of the links he found interesting, not a diary.
"weblog" meant "a webpage where a weblogger 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting."
— Dispatches from Blogistan, O'Reilly
We mix the two up all the time now without noticing. A food diary is really just a log, counting numbers with no feelings involved. A dream journal uses a log's dated, stacked layout to hold something personal instead.
When the Diary Went Public
I started keeping a diary back in junior high. I didn't have a lot of friends then, and I got bullied a fair amount. Writing in that diary was something that kept me going. I don't remember most of what I wrote, and I have no idea where those notebooks ended up. Maybe they're in a landfill somewhere. Strange thought, a kid's handwriting from decades ago, still out there in pieces.
That kind of writing used to be private, by definition. But somewhere in the early days of blogging, people started taking that same habit and putting a version of it out in public on purpose. It wasn't instant. LiveJournal let you mark entries public, friends-only, or private, so it took years before "wide open by default" became the norm. Even after Merholz shortened "weblog" to "blog" in 1999, that was just wordplay, nothing about what the word covered. It took several more years, and way more people wanting to write about their own lives than do what the old weblogs did, before the diary-style meaning won out.
Here's the part that ties it together for me. "Log" gave blogging its shape, dated entries stacked one after another, always adding on. "Journal" gave it its voice, personal and reflective. A blog is a container built by sailors and computer engineers, filled with diary-style writing.
The Long Rumor of Its Death
I started thinking blogging itself might be dying, at one point. I actually wrote about that exact worry once already, back in August, when a stat like this first stopped me in my tracks. This time, digging into where the word "blog" itself came from gave me a new way into the same feeling.
Looking back at everything this container has held, ships' logs, junior high notebooks, link lists, it's honestly no surprise it survived Facebook and Twitter too. That's the whole point of a container built this loosely: it can hold almost anything, which means it's hard to kill.
And that's really the thing I'm glad I learned. Something this old, something people have been doing since Babylon, since sailors threw a weighted log overboard to measure their speed, since a kid scribbling in a notebook, doesn't just die because a couple of apps showed up.
Still Filling the Container
These days a blog can be almost anything. Some stay close to the original 1997 roots, gear reviews, a running list of good links. Others are personal essays, reblogs, recipe collections, or meta blogging, which is exactly what this post is doing right now.
I'm glad blogging exists at all, honestly. It's a process, writing something down and learning along the way, and that's really what I love about it. I write it mostly for myself first. But I'm always glad when someone else wants to read along too. :-)
I've blogged on and off over the years. Some stretches I write a lot, some I go quiet for months. But I keep coming back, and I'm glad I do. This time, though, I'm sure I'm back for real. Brennan's post got me thinking about 450 years of blogging. Somehow I ended up thousands of years further back than that. Six hundred million of us are apparently still doing this, in one form or another. Either way, I'm glad to be one more person still filling the container.
This post started as a draft from Claude (AI). I edited and expanded it, put it in my own words, and every decision about what stayed, what went, and what it says was mine. A few of the historical claims here were fact-checked along the way too, with citations linked above.