A look back at what the word "weblog" really meant — and why we're using it again.
Before podcasts, before YouTube channels, before timelines and algorithms… there was the weblog.
In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" to describe what he was doing on his site — logging the web. It wasn't polished or structured. It was simply a running stream of thoughts, links, and whatever felt worth sharing in the moment. Two years later, Peter Merholz playfully broke the word into "we blog," and just like that, the modern term stuck.
But what we call a "blog" today has drifted pretty far from what a weblog originally was.
Early weblogs weren't built with intention in the way content is now. They weren't trying to rank on search engines or convert readers into anything. They felt more like a public notebook — part diary, part conversation, part collection of things someone didn't want to forget.
One of the earliest examples, Justin's Links by Justin Hall, captured that perfectly. It was personal, unfiltered, and constantly evolving. You weren't reading a finished piece — you were stepping into someone's stream of thought while it was still forming.
That's what made it interesting. It felt alive.
Honestly, I don't really remember blogs — or weblogs for that matter — from the 90s. Or at least not in the way we think about them now.
What I do remember is spending a ton of time on sites like Yahoo, bouncing between pages, getting lost in chat rooms, and being an early adopter of IMDb — just going down rabbit holes learning about movies that were coming out or had just been announced.
Finding stuff back then felt easy, but not in a precise way. It wasn't like today where everything is optimized, categorized, and exactly what you're searching for. You could find what you wanted, but it was usually surrounded by things you didn't expect. And that was kind of the fun of it.
Even something like looking up video game guides was different. They existed, but they lived on random FAQ sites, usually just walls of text. No images, no polish, just someone taking the time to write everything out and share it. It worked, but it wasn't clean. It felt earned.
And honestly, I might not even be remembering the true "90s" version of this. I didn't really get online until around 1998, and even that's a little hazy. A lot of what I'm thinking about probably bleeds more into that 1999 to early 2000s era. But the feeling is still the same.
Websites were just… different.
If you want to see what I mean, check out Wayback Machine. You can type in almost any site and see what it looked like years ago. There are broken links, things don't always load right, but it gives you a real sense of how the internet used to feel. Seeing something like Amazon in 1998 compared to now is wild.
And there's actually a little Easter egg built into the Super 90's Bros. site. If you type a URL into the address bar on our site, it'll open a new tab and take you to what that website looked like back in 1997 — if it existed.
The 90s internet wasn't built around clean formats or polished content. It was messy in the best way. You had forums, message boards, fan pages, and random sites that felt like hidden corners of the internet you weren't supposed to find — but were glad you did.
There wasn't a clear separation between creator and audience. Everyone was contributing in some way, even if it was just posting a thought, sharing a link, or jumping into a conversation halfway through.
Weblogs fit right into that world. They weren't the main attraction. They were the connective tissue — the in-between space where ideas lived before they became something bigger.
When we started building out the Super 90's Brothers site, calling this section a "blog" didn't feel right. It felt too modern, too structured, too expected. At the same time, a message board didn't quite capture what we wanted either.
What we kept coming back to was that original feeling of the early internet — something loose, something evolving, something that didn't need to be finished to be worth sharing.
So we landed on the original term: the weblog.
Not as a throwback just for the sake of nostalgia, but as a way to bring back that mindset.
This is where the ideas go that don't need a full episode yet. Sometimes that looks like putting together a top five list of video games from the past, or revisiting newer games that feel like they were pulled straight out of the 90s. Other times it might be a quick take on a movie we just watched and can't stop thinking about, or a random piece of 90s history that suddenly hits and feels worth exploring.
Not everything belongs in a podcast, and that's kind of the point. This is where those thoughts land first, before they turn into something bigger.
Super 90's Brothers has always been about helping you remember, relive, and rediscover the 90s.
The podcast is where we sit down and really explore those ideas. But the weblog is where they start.
It's where we wander, where we follow threads, where we let nostalgia hit without overthinking it. And in a lot of ways, that wandering feeling is exactly what made the early internet — and the 90s as a whole — so memorable in the first place.
Go explore the weblog. You never know what you'll find.