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I have often seen the question "Why is it called a blog?" or "Why did they name it a blog?" or ... you get the idea, pick your own variation. For a long time I have gone the easy route of many others in just saying "It is called a blog because it was shortened from weblog". Is that accurate anymore? can we really just so easily define a blog as a variation on a weblog? Would that be akin to saying we call it a cell phone because it evolved from CB radios?

I have seen it said in many places that "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger, so I decided to look into this. Barger began to post links accompanied by short descriptions on his website back in 1997 (December 17th to be exact), these were more akin to a manually entered search engine like Google or Yahoo than they were to what most people think of when we hear the term "blog" today. In fact, Barger's own website, www.robotwisdom.com, defines what a weblog is: "A weblog ... is a webpage where a weblogger ... 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting." So rather than being a log of daily life like so many of the blogs we know today are, a weblog is a collection of links to other pages that the weblogger wants to find again and recommends to others.
Jason Lee Miller, of WebProNews, says in a July 20, 2006 article that the favorite subject of bloggers is: "Me". People, as a general rule, love to blog about themselves. It gives them a chance to share things about their daily lives with the world, of course, a good percent of them (over half according to Miller) write anonymously. If even the anonymous blogs are, in a large part, primarily about the person that wrote the blog, can they be said to be a derivative of a list of descriptive links to other pages?
And, going back to Barger's website, among the frequently asked questions Barger himself seems to respond to a question on if he truly coined the term weblog or not:
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Q. "Wasn't the name 'weblog' already taken for server-logs/ http-logs/ usage-logs/ logfiles?
A. Yeah, well... how many different names do they need, anyway? (And if you can think of a better name than 'weblog', just start using it and see if it catches on. It's all Darwinian.)"
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So, if a blog is not a weblog, what is it and how did it get the name blog?
I went looking and found that on May 23, 1999 BradLands.com blamed the term blog, or more precisely "wee-blog" on PeterMe.com - "and

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