That is a good question. I agree with Joshua Claybourn that Andrew Sullivan, one of the earliest bloggers, put it best. Sullivan described blogging as:

“. . . a simple web technology, based on a single website called - yes - Blogger.com. The word comes from the expression “web-log,” which simply means a live, real-time, online personal diary. Blogger - pioneered and still run by one man, Evan Williams - makes that completely easy. Within minutes, you can have a website and post to the universe any stray, brilliant or sublimely stupid thought that comes into your mind. Blogger even provides a handy, idiot-proof rubric for a simple site. And all this is provided for free.

“But what bloggers do is completely new - and cannot be replicated on any other medium. It’s somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. It’s genuinely new. And it harnesses the web’s real genius - its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web.”

Blogging has come a long way since Sullivan first wrote those words; platforms such as blogger now number in the hundreds. Besides blogger, two of the most popular platforms are Movable Type and Wordpress. We use Wordpress here at Sounding the Trumpet.

There’s many good articles on blogging or the history of blogging on the web. We’ve collected several of the best below:

Wikipedia: Blog
Google Definition: Blog
Digging Deeper: Your Guide to Citizen Journalism (MediaShift)
Digging Deeper: Your Guide to Blogging (MediaShift)
Digging Deeper: Your Guide to RSS (MediaShift)
World Magazine: Year of the Blog and Open Source Journalism
Samizdata: Blogging Terms Defined