"Blog" is of course a contraction of "weblog," generally agreed to have
been invented by Jorn Barger as a name for his Robot Wisdom web site in
December 1997. The earliest use seems to have been by Peter Merholz,
who wrote in a sidebar on the home page of his weblog, Peterme.com, "For
What It's Worth: I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee'-
blog. Or "blog" for short." An archive of his historic mot juste is at
http://web.archive.org/web/19991013021124/http://peterme.com/index.html.
Current historical records do not permit an exact dating, but it clearly
was not before April 28, 1999, when the Wayback Machine shows that the
sidebar was not yet present, and not after May 23, 1999, when there was
a reference to it on Bradlands.com.
Merholz's passing remark probably would have produced few ripples, but
for Pyra Labs, which chose to refer to weblogs as "blogs" and to name
their own product "blogger." The domain name blogger.com was registered
on June 22, 1999, probably the first public use of the word. According
to Meg Hourihan, an insider at Pyra Labs whose email is reproduced
below, it was Evan Williams who devised the name "blogger."