Blog and blogosphere were first coined by a software developer and journalist, Tim O’Reilly, in a 1997 article entitled “Web 2.0: The Future of News.
” O’Reilly described the blogosphere as “a global community of bloggers who write about their experiences using the web and share links to other blogs they find informative.”.
The term blog was originally used to describe a personal website created on a Windows platform. The first blogs were simply text files with the filename extension .html. Blogging software was not widely available until later in 1997, when Netscape released its Navigator 4.
0 browser with built-in support for blogging. Blogs became more popular in the mid-to-late 1990s as more people started using the Internet and began blogging about their personal experiences online.
The terms blog and blogosphere have continued to be used in various contexts over the years, but they have not always been defined precisely. In 2006, Merriam-Webster added the term blogosphere to its online dictionary, defining it as “a global community of bloggers who write about their experiences using the web and share links to other blogs they find informative.
” In 2013, The Economist named the blogosphere one of the ten most influential ideas of the 21st century.