Online diary
personal blog
An online diary or web diary, is a personal diary or journal that is published on the World Wide Web on a personal website or a diary-hosting website.
Overview
Online diaries have existed since at least 1994. As a community formed, these publications came to be almost exclusively known as online journals. Today they are almost exclusively called blogs, though some differentiate by calling them personal blogs. The running updates of online diarists combined with links inspired the term 'weblog' which was eventually contracted to form the word 'blog'.
In online diaries, people write about their day-to-day experiences, social commentary, complaints, poems, prose, illicit thoughts and any content that might be found in a traditional paper diary or journal. They often allow readers to contribute through comments or community posting.
Modern online diary platforms may allow the writer to make entries from a PC, tablet or smartphone. Writers might rate how they feel each day, invite someone to engage in a personal conversation or find counseling.
Early history
Online diaries soon caught the attention of the media with the publication of the book 24 Hours in Cyberspace (1996) which captured personal profiles of the people involved in early web pages.
The public source identifies “Online diary” as personal blog. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Online, diary and personal.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Online diary”, the useful work is to connect “personal blog” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2393445. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994 and 1996.
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- Subject orientation
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Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Online diary”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Online diary primary sources, Online diary archive and Online research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Online diary” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.