The launch date of the “first blog” depends on how you define it, but 1998 marked the first known instance of a blog on a traditional news site. The original term “weblog” was shortened to just “blog” a year later, and that term was named Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2004.
Business blogging is now commonplace. Three-quarters of B2B marketers and 61% of their B2C counterparts use blogs as part of their social media content. Blogging varies by company size as well: while 66% of companies overall have blogs, less than half (42%) of Fortune 500 maintain one.
It’s an evolving , dynamic medium. Early blog posts were often either long blocks of text or annotated lists of resources available on other websites. Today this channel includes multi-author blogs and different formats like podcasting and video blogs (vlogs).
More broadly, the line between “traditional” media and blogs is blurring. Mashable is technically a media site though commonly viewed as a blog. The Huffington Post is a hybrid blog site often lumped in with the media. Forbes is a traditional publisher increasingly reliant on bloggers for content. Even a publication as old-school as the New York Times now maintains a blog (actually, a collection of them).