David Stonehouse wrote in September 2003: "Blogs - the latest web craze - are springing up everywhere these days. Short for weblogs, blogs are online diaries penned by folks eager to share their thoughts, feelings or everyday lives with the rest of us."
That was 4 years ago - and even then the craze was already 6+ years old:
- blue's news, July 1996
- Doom-Ed, August 1996
- Drudge Report, May 1997
- Robot Wisdom, December 1997 - the term weblog was made popular by Jorn Barger
- peterme.com, April 1999 - the term blog was coined one and a half years later by Peter Merholz. peterme.com today ...
- Boing Boing, January 2000
- Brainsluice, January 2000
- Gawker, February 2001
We just came across a sligthly different and much more detailed version of blogging history with the Blog Herald (2005) and a recent post (December 2007). The term weblog seems to have originated already in August 1995 with a Usenet post by the researchers G. Raikundalia & M. Rees.