Many historians point to a Swarthmore student's personal website, started in January 1994, as the first blog — years before the word 'blog' existed.

Justin Hall's site mixed short posts, links he liked, and increasingly personal writing about his own life, at a time when almost nothing like it existed. The term for what he was doing — 'weblog' — wasn't coined until 1997, by fellow early-web writer Jorn Barger. Hall kept posting for over a decade, and is still sometimes called the founding father of personal blogging.