Dispatches from Blogistan: A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger

3. Blogs as Linkfests

The word “blog” is relatively new, but the concept of web pages that contain pointers to other web pages is as old as the World Wide Web itself. Originally, the phrase “web log” was applied to geeky, behind-the-scenes files that recorded a website’s activity—number of visitors, page views, navigation paths, downloaded files, and the like. By the time Jorn Barger published the phrase as a single word on his Robot Wisdom website in 1997, many agreed with him that “weblog” meant “a webpage where a weblogger ‘logs’ all the other webpages she finds interesting.” It would be another year before Peter Merholz further shortened the word to “blog” on his peterme.com site, but by this time, there was a thriving subculture of individuals ...