I decided to do a quick research project. When was the first mention of blog, blogging or weblogs? How does July 25, 1999 sound? (quick note, by 'research' I mean...let me spend about an afternoon playing with this)

Update: I guess I could have gone to Wikipedia and found this. Wikipedia dates the first use of the word as 1997, with rapid growth in 1999.

This was the first metion I found. It is a post to the newly created deja.comm.weblogs USENET group.

A description of weblogs

Authors of weblogs are encouraged to post here about the problems and potentials of maintaining a log, and others are welcome to ask questions or make comments on these topics.

A follow-up post on July 27 by Edward Vielmetti contained this comment:

Any aspiring software developer want to write "My Blog", and then any aspiring author want to write "Blogging for Dummies?"

Oh Ed, if you only took it upon yourself. Ed's comment also discussed how there was no software solution to create a blog. He was using simple text editors to cut/paste new content in.

I would assume that the term blog or blogging was used earlier, but like all history, it is made by those who write it. Do you know of any earlier mention? Let me know.

Methodology
The basis for my search was USENET. For those of you not familiar with USENET it was where all the action was. Back in the 80's and early 90's if you had any technical question or wanted to discuss any topic in detail USENET was the place to go. I figured the initial discussions about blogs would take place in USENET.

I used Google's Group Search to search USENET messages. (a traditional Google search does provide a date next to a link, but you cannot sort by date.) Google Groups allowed me to search USENET posts from 1981 to the present. In other words, pre-WWW. The search results can also be sorted by date.

Another resource could have been Blog FAQ's, but most of them are focused more on the setup/use of blogs rather than the history.

Results
I started off by searching for three different terms: blog, blogging and weblog. One of the issues with 'weblog' is that it can also refer to stats stored by a web server. So many of the results contained technical discussions of web server stats.

To help narrow my search on selected words, I would use the advanced search option to limit my date range, for example blog, for the year 1989. In continued changing the year variable.

The term 'blog' was also used to describe software to keep track of bowling scores.

The first mention of blog or weblog in reference to a 'blog' came up first in the 1999 search. There are many entries dated in December, including the first USENET spam/ad for a blog service.

Sorting the results by date showed the post on July 25, 1999 to be the first. Subsequent searches in 2000 and on show a marked increase in use of the term.

Caveats
Another resource that could help this search would be archives of e-mail discussion lists. Many technical issues had lists devoted to them (remember the days of Majordomo!). Unfortunately, it is difficult to search the archives of these lists.

Revisions
I expect to receive proof/documentation/URLs of earlier mentions. If I do, I will post them here.