The first “official” blog was David Winer’s “Scripting News,” which appeared in 1997. Around that time, Jesse Jame Gerrett, editor of Infosift, decided to compile a list of weblogs that he found similar to his own, which was published on the website Camworld. In the beginning of 1999, there were 23 such known sites. However, at the end of the year, the list at Camworld could no longer keep track of every blog on the net. The early blogging community shortened the term ‘weblog” to “wee-blog,” and finally to “blog,” and the authors of these webpages were known as bloggers. In mid-1999 Brigette Eaton started the Eatonweb Portal, a link database exclusively for blog links. She accepted link submissions on one criterion only: the site must consist of dated entries. Although there was much debate at that time about how to define a weblog, Eatonweb Portal became so popular as a blog reference site that its criteria became widely accepted as the prevailing definition.

The early bloggers were web enthusiasts—there were few web publishing tools available at the time, so bloggers generally had to have some knowledge of HTML. Their entries consisted mainly of textual information and links; blogs included commentary, essays and personal reflections. With the advent of Pitas.com, the first free blog-publishing website, in July of 1999, the popularity of blogging saw enormous growth. In August, Pyra released Blogger, and later in the year, other similar tools such as Edit This Page, Groksoup, and Velocinews hit the web. All of these services sought to give users an easy, convenient way to publish their blog-based webpages; even users with no prior HTML knowledge could set up and updated a blog with a few clicks of a button