Before blogs rose to prominence on the Internet, they were used mainly as simple online diaries in which users could keep an account of their personal lives. Early blogs, previously referred to as "weblogs", were manually updated portions of Web sites. Eventually, tools were created to facilitate the production and maintenance of these Web articles and blog publishing became available to a larger, less technical audience. This resulted in the enormously popular class of publishing we now recognize as blogs.

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and was shortened to "blog" by Peter Merholz in 1999. The creation of the word "blog" and similar terms, as well as their rapid incorporation into the English lexicon, is itself an indicator of blogging's influence. Blogs gained popularity in 1999 after the creation of blogging engines such as Open Diary, LiveJournal and blogger.com. The millions of online blogs comprise what has become known as the blogosphere, or the collective community of blogs across the Internet. Topics that blogs cover range from personal to corporate, political, travel, education and fashion. More recently, blogs have been utilized by professional journalists to facilitate more up-to-date coverage that is not always feasible when working within the mainstream media.