...around 1997, when Jorn Barger launched his website, titling it “The Robot Wisdom Weblog.” Barger’s plan was to curate his favorite links from around the web, and add bits of commentary to each one. In other words, he meant to keep a log of his web experience. Hence weblog.

In their earliest days, webloggers stood as gatekeepers to the web’s ever-growing well of content. Each day, these URL pioneers would post a few new links and sprinkle in their own commentary. Blogs acted as a signpost for web users, and following a few key blogs was enough to keep track of just about everything new on the web. Many began to look at the blogging community as a brand new type of media, one that often stood far closer to an impartial truth than traditional mediums would allow for.

1999, Peter Merholz threw up his own weblog, and in the sidebar added the tagline: "I’ve decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee’- blog. Or “blog” for short."

In the beginning, most bloggers hand coded their sites, adding a new HTML page to their server each time they had a new entry, or just updating the homepage to include the newest links. But soon enough, tools showed up to help bloggers with the process.

...on the fringes, a new type of blog was emerging. The personal blog. These sites ditched the curated links and focused exclusively on commentary. Bloggers used their site to chronicle their personal journey, from the almost boring and banal to the weird and wonderful. This new type of blog was less an alternative media source and more akin to an online journal or diary. And these writers saw themselves not as gatekeepers to the web, but as sharers of their own identity.

New tools soon caught up with this shifting perspective. The first of the bunch to do so was LiveJournal...

Blogger came next. And it would prove to be the most popular of the early blogging tools. The platform first launched in August of 1999, but picked up steam the following year when it introduced the concept of a permalink.

These platforms made blogging open, in every sense of the word. Visitors were greeted with a single, open textarea on a free platform that was open to all to participate.

Blogger became the platform choice for a lot of writers out there. It certainly was for Mena Trott

Trott had the feeling that platforms like Blogger did not go nearly far enough.

Trott wanted her own site to stand out from the crowd. To be quintessentially hers. Blogger wouldn’t let her do that. So together with her husband, a Perl programmer, she built Movable Type...And with that move, Trott ushered in a third generation of blogging.

Movable Type allowed users to set up their blog on their own server, and have complete control over its look and feel.

Blog (the noun and verb) became a word familiar not just to web geeks, but to everyone. Lots of imitators and innovators followed in the wake of Moveable Type. Open source platforms like WordPress rose to meet the rising demand. But for a long time, Moveable Type was the standard. It fed its community with a constant stream of new features that promoted openness and freedom.

Blogging, as a community and a practice, continues to be refined to this day thanks to the dedication of web users everywhere. But its sharpest point was made the day Mena Trott decided that a blog could be more than just some text on a page. It could be one of a kind.