Where Did The Word Blog Come From?

According to Wikipedia, "The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms."

A blog isn't anything 'exactly'. In fact, with over 150 million blogs online, being created at about the rate of 5 per second, there is anything but an atypical blog. What exactly is a blog? Anything you want it to be!

One of the key characteristics of a blog is the use of software to add regular posts to a website that are displayed in reverse chronological order and archived according to date. This probably stems from the origins of weblogs as a form of online journalism or of publishing personal diaries about events. However, the way blogs are used now don't necessarily rely on a date format or follow a diary method.

I write a lot of blogs, including a blog about online business. In this blog I don't write any kind of journal, but post on different related subjects in the make money online theme and instead of dates I use categories to keep track of the subjects I've written for my readers. This is a very common way that niche blogs are organised and it is more effective for readers than following a date archiving system.

Blogging is a very popular online past-time for many people but there are still a lot of folks who are new to the whole scene and ask, how do I start my own blog?

There are a few ways to go about it, but the easiest is to find a free blog hosting site like Wordpress or Blogger and start to follow the tutorials that are available there. These easy to use free services make getting started in blogging easy and as you grow in confidence you can begin to experiment with adding and modifying themes and even self hosting on your own domain.

Blogging hasn't only become a popular way for people to express themselves online, but the easy of creating and managing a blog has encouraged a lot of internet entreprenuers to use blogging as a way to make money online. This is done in a variety of ways, including affiliate marketing, selling products and services, generating paid leads and selling advertising space. In fact, a free blogger blog is one of the easiest ways to make money blogging because it comes ready to integrate Google Adsense advertising revenue system into the blog layout.

To succeed in making money with your blog the most important thing is to have sufficient targeted traffic (i.e. visitors to your blog who are actually interested in the topics you are writing about). This could be either social traffic or search engine traffic or a combination of both. Learning to master traffic generation is one of the biggest challenges for would-be blogging entrepreneurs, but in simple terms it requires either creating a brand (for social traffic) or knowing how to get backlinks (for search engine traffic) or earn with Clickbank.

Hopefully now you know the answer to the question, where did the word blog come from, but more importantly you know where is the blog going and how you can become a blogger - even how you can make money from blogging today!

James Spacey writes about a variety of topics including building commercial insurance and cheap unsecured loans.