Friday, September 10, 1999

September 10, 1999

LEST YE FORGET: The St. Louis International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival continues this weekend and next week at the fabulous Tivoli Theatre, right here in River University City. Upcoming highlights include The Velocity of Gary, Eileen is a Spy (with guest director Sayer Frey), Better Than Chocolate, Defying Gravity and Edge of Seventeen.

IT'S PETER'S FAULT: A year ago, "weblog" was hardly a common word, and then it was used to describe sites like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and you get the idea. Then the supremely urbane Peter Merholz decided it would be fun to pronounce "weblog" as "wee'blog" and I thought that was kind of cute. Then folks started truncating that to merely "blog" and -- ugh! -- it's stuck! (The BradLands is, I suppose, roughly blog-like. In fact, if you kiss my blog, it becomes a handsome prince.)

So, now then. Where are we headed? Will personal publishing soon be described as being "as simple as falling off a blog"? Shall we see ultra-conservative gays start weblogs and dub themselves Blog Cabin Republicans? Track the tides with an Ebb Blog? Is blog- (or -blog) poised to become the prefix/suffix of the next century? Will we soon suffer from (and tire of) blogorreah? Despite its whimsical provenance, it's an awkward, homely little word.

Goodbye, cyberspace! Hello, blogiverse! Blogosphere? Blogmos? (Carl Sagan: "Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs.")

All of the above drivel is noted by way of mentioning that two folks wrote to point out I left out a blogging tool yesterday. Well, sort of. Blogger is neither pita-like nor GrokSoupish. It's a tool for publishing a weblog that is edited on the Blogger servers and published on yours. It's pretty cool, but oy! That name!

Peter is, however, cute and winsome and talented, so that trumps my annoyance.