February 4th is our Meetaversary. February 15th is our Dataversary, and we even celebrate our Ask-aversary – The day John finally asked me to marry him! We celebrate the dog’s birthday and every other notable occasion in our lives. We’re really into setting up memorials and making traditions.

And so…drumroll please…today is my one month Blogaversary. I started writing Paladini Potpie on April 29th.

Only a few months prior to that that date I really didn’t even know what a blog was.

This last month has been quite a learning experience, stretching the old brain to grasp so much new stuff. But in the words of the elderly Michelangelo Buonarotti, “Ancora Imparo!” I am still learning!

Today I decided to celebrate my Blogaverary by researching a little about what a blog is and how it all got started.

To begin with, I learned that blog is a blend of the words “web” and “log” – web log.

The fore-runner to the blog was created sometime in 1971 by Les Earnest. He created something called finger protocol. This was a technical program that enabled people to see who else was using the computer network, and to find out basic information about the other users.

By the early 90’s people were beginning to journal and write articles online.

This was about the time John brought home 3 big boxes from Costco and plunked them down in our living room. “You are a writer,” he told me, taking the yellow legal pad out of my hand, and holding it behind his back, out of my reach. “It’s time you learned to use a word-processor.”

I thought about my drawer full journals – a lifetime of journals written in my beautiful penmanship. And all the scattered notebooks of thoughts and ideas… half written stories… the start of a fabulous novel…somewhere. There was some merit to working on the computer, but I still really liked my yellow legal pads and I love all those pretty journals…

I haven’t abandoned my handwritten journals, but I am being inexorably drawn into this exciting new adventure. I certainly never expected to be doing a journal or a log on the computer…let alone on the web!

The name web log was first used in 1997, and in 1999 Peter Merholz of peterme.com put the words together to make weblog…or blog for short.

And, as happens with so many nouns…the noun “blog” became the verb for writing the blog.

And so I now blog on my blog.

Wikipedia says that as of February 16, 2011 there were 156 million public blogs on the internet. But that was 3 months ago. Today it’s anyone’s guess!