The Evoluation of Blogging

• Sometime in 1971Stanford's Les Earnest creates the "finger" protocol.
  
• December 1977 The finger protocol becomes an official standard.
  
• January 1994 Swarthmore student Justin Hall begins compiling lists of links at his site, links.net, and continues adding to the site for 11 years.
  
• January 1995 Early online diarist Carolyn Burke publishes her first entry for Carolyn's Diary.
  
• April 1997 Dave Winer launches Scripting News, which he calls the longest-running Web log currently on the Internet.
  
• September 1997 Slashdot begins publishing "News for Nerds."
  
• December 1997 Jorn Barger's RobotWisdom.com site apparently becomes the first to call itself a Web log.
  
• Sometime in 1999• Brad Fitzpatrick launches Livejournal, which he calls his "accidental success." • Peter Merholz of Peterme.com declares he has decided "to pronounce the word 'weblog' as 'wee-blog.' Or 'blog' for short." • The word "blog" first appears in print, according to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.
  
• August 1999 Three friends who founded a San Francisco start-up called Pyra Labs create a tool called Blogger "more or less on a whim."
  
• January 2001 First crop of blogs nominated for the "Bloggies" award.
  
• October 2001First version of Movable Type content management software becomes available.
  
• February 2003 Google acquires Pyra and its Blogger software.
  
• May 2003 First official version of WordPress open-source blogging software released for download.
  
• October 2003 Six Apart releases first version of its Typepad blogging service.
  
• January 2004 Boston-based Steve Garfield launches his video blog, considered one of the first such "vlogs."
  
• October 2005 VeriSign buys Dave Winer's Weblogs.com. Around the same time, AOL snaps up blog publisher Weblogs Inc.
  
• February 2006 Veteran blogger Jason Kottke abandons his yearlong attempt to live off of micropayments through his blog.
  
• January 2007 Members of the Media Bloggers Association are among the first bloggers to receive press credentials from a federal court.
  
• February 2007 Freelance video blogger Josh Wolf becomes the longest-serving journalist behind bars in U.S. history, on contempt charges.