Happy 10th Birthday To The Weblog

Ten years ago yesterday the word was coined.

If you’re a blogger, hopefully you ate a birthday cake yesterday to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the word “weblog.”   It was coined December 17, 1997 by Jorn Barger as a word that described his activities on his Robot Wisdom page – logging curious web sites on his online journal, which he updated regularly.   Of course, the word stuck, although it’s become shorted to simply “blog.” These days, according to some reports, there are over 70 million blogs posted regularly.   That’s a far cry from 1998, when some believed there were a total of 23 weblogs. A year after that, however, new tools made the sites much easier to work, and the shorter term blog started to become part of the lexicon, according to the BBC.   Technorati estimates 120,000 new blogs are created daily, with overall posts added at the stunning and scary rate of 17 per second.   So happy birthday to the blog – and how long before social networks turn ten?