A 450-year History of Blogging

If you take a look at [my website's homepage](https://brennan.day), 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.](https://web.archive.org/web/19991013021124/http://peterme.com/index.html)"

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 glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes [sic]” in order to measure the ship’s speed.[2] (The length was eventually counted by literal knots tied in the line at regular intervals; thus, our equally iconic term “knots.”) Recordings of the log-derived information, eventually replaced by the “chip log,” a weighted wooden quadrant, were entered into what would come to be called the “log board.” > — Janet Sorenson, ["Logging-In: The Ship's Log as Medium"](https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/logging-ships-log-medium-0)

A log board helped sailors record a ship's speed and direction hour by hour before writing them into the permanent official logbook. This was an instrument of navigation, a tool for cataloguing the wind and weather as much as figuring out your location during a voyage within the endless blue horizon of an unforgiving saltwater sea.

The term "log" moved from maritime use to broader record-keeping during the 19th and 20th centuries as the practice of writing details in a ship's logbook was adopted by other industries. Engineers, scientists, and aviators utilized the same style of sequential, chronological record-keeping.

"Flight logs have been around as long as aviation itself. The Wright brothers kept detailed notebooks, recording dispassionately the results of their experiments in building the first airplane." > — Tom LeCompte, ["The Book of Hours"](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-book-of-hours-136493265/)

This transition established the log as more of a default structure for recording events over time, regardless of context. The log became a way of thinking about information.

When looking at the tran