Some folks have asked me about how blogging came to be. I stumbled across a short version of a history in Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig's recent book, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.

"An even more experimental form that has begun to attract some academic historians is the blog. Jorn Barger, the proprietor of the Robot Wisdom Weblog, first coined the term in December 1997. Originally, weblogs (in Barger’s definition) were simply web pages “where a weblogger . . . logs all the other webpages she finds interesting.” But rapidly blogs (the truncation of the word quickly took hold) became something closer to personal journals, especially popular among twenty-somethings working in dot-coms. Starting in 1999, blogs spread rapidly across the net, fueled, in particular, by the availability of easy-to-use software packages like Blogger that simplified the task of creating and maintaining a blog."

-http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/exploring/4.php