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Sometime in 1971 – Stanford’s Les Earnest creates the “finger” protocol.

December 1977 – The finger protocol becomes an official standard.

January 1994 – Swarthmore student Justin Hall begins compiling lists of links at his site, links.net, and continues adding to the site for 11 years.

January 1995 – Early online diarist Carolyn Burke publishes her first entry for Carolyn’s Diary.

April 1997 – Dave Winer launches Scripting News, which he calls the longest-running Web log currently on the Internet.

September 1997 – Slashdot begins publishing “News for Nerds.”

December 1997 – Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom.com site apparently becomes the first to call itself a Web log.

Sometime in 1999

• Brad Fitzpatrick launches Livejournal, which he calls his “accidental success.”
• Peter Merholz of Peterme.com declares he has decided “to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as ‘wee-blog.’ Or ‘blog’ for short.”
• The word “blog” first appears in print, according to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.

August 1999 – Three friends who founded a San Francisco start-up called Pyra Labs create a tool called Blogger “more or less on a whim.”

January 2001 – First crop of blogs nominated for the “Bloggies” award.

October 2001 – First version of Movable Type content management software becomes available.

February 2003 – Google acquires Pyra and its Blogger software.

May 2003 – First official version of WordPress open-source blogging software released for download.

October 2003 – Six Apart releases first version of its Typepad blogging service.

January 2004 – Boston-based Steve Garfield launches his video blog, considered one of the first such “vlogs.”

October 2005 – VeriSign buys Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com. Around the same time, AOL snaps up blog publisher Weblogs Inc.

February 2006 – Veteran blogger Jason Kottke abandons his yearlong attempt to live off of micropayments through his blog.

January 2007 – Members of the Media Bloggers Association are among the first bloggers to receive press credentials from a federal court.

February 2007 – Freelance video blogger Josh Wolf becomes the longest-serving journalist behind bars in U.S. history, on contempt charges.