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There are a couple of popular stories about where blogging came from and in his book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming and Why it Matters, Scott Rosenberg discusses the most popular origin of blogging.

Early 2001, at the height of the dot.com crash, a San Francisco startup company, Pyra Labs ran out of money – just as nearly all the other companies were doing. The co-founder of the business, a young man from Nebraska named Even Williams, decided to give it one more shot and gathered up $40,000 in funding and moved the Pyra servers into his apartment. This allowed the company’s 100,000 registered users to keep the Pyra service, Blogger, to publish their online journals or blogs.

A year later, Williams had 700,000 subscribers sharing everything from their feelings, grandma’s fabulous potpie recipe to antidotes of what their dog did that afternoon. This was a significant new form of ‘grass-roots’ media. Blogging began to turn traditional publishing companies on their ear, giving everyone with a computer and a modem a chance to express themselves, and more importantly, be heard, for free.

There are several names associated with the beginning of blogging, Justin Hall, a Swarthmore College drop out, began posting personal information on an Internet website in 1994. He would link some of his ramblings to various sites he found on the Internet, including porn and bootleg music. Another name credited with the being one of the first bloggers is Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer, journalist and essayist.

One of the oldest and longest running blogs is Dave Winer’s Scripting News. And another long running blog that combined video, pictures and text from a webcam was Wearable Wireless Webcam.

Millions subscribe to the theory that there was another person who began the blogging history and that was in 1993 with Mosaic’s ‘What’s New’ page. One could argue that the forum for a public diary began way before Mosaic’s page when in the late Renaissance years when diaries became ‘in vogue.’

In the early days, a blogger would simply manually update common components of a web site, although through the development of tools to smooth the progress of the construction and continuance of web articles put in reverse sequential order allowed for the publishing method to become viable on a much bigger level. 

Could blogging actually be a business and make a company money – besides advertising with annoying, flashing ads, yes. Nick Denton, a former Financial Times reporter turned entrepreneur led the way to a money making blog. Denton hired other reporters to post blog entries on sites such as Gawker for the gossip hungry and on tech gadget blog Gizmodo. Denton recognized what worked early on and stuck to it. He began with lots of attitude, frequent postings, strong focus and entry-level pay. After a short period of time, his opponent Jason Calacanis launched the blog network Weblogs and lured away some of Denton’s best people with promises of equity stakes. In 2005, Arianna Huffington came up with yet another model – she persuaded bloggers to write for free, in order to boost their brands, as contributors to her newspaper, the hugely popular Huffington Post.

Today, blogs are everywhere, including the History Channel website. A special program called ‘Band of Bloggers’ in which there will be special video and text posted from those soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to having a ‘Band of Bloggers’ on their website, a special about the project, featuring some of the video and text from soldiers, was aired on the History Channel television station.