Friday, May 23, 2008

Birth of blog

It's been ten years, more or less, since Peter Merholz published a little squib in the sidebar of his Petermemes personal website and made a permanent dent in the worldwide lexicon.



Although the post was undated, I first noted its appearance here on May 23, 1999, earning me a citation alongside Peter in the Oxford English Dictionary entry tracing the lineage of the word "blog". Just three months later, on August 23, 1999, a San Francisco start-up called Pyra Labs launched Blogger, a public version of their internal weblogging tool (at one time billed as "Amphetamines For Your Website"), and...well, you probably know the rest.

Ah well. Happy birthday, you awkward, uneuphonious little word. I'm chuffed to say I knew you when you were but a wee blog.

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

That word again!

Rebecca asked about the citation I mentioned in this entry, and whether Peter was, in fact, credited with the coinage. I went to look again and realized that, in fact, my reference to Peter's comment appears to pre-date the comment itself. That may be because his quip was in an undated sidebar on his site. Anyway, here we are, sic transit gloria mundi, caveat lector, etcetera etcetera...



Note also that this appears to be a draft entry which, I take it, means it hasn't moved into the printed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary just yet.

The OED entry for "weblog", incidentally, cites Jorn Barger—rightly, I think—as being the first to use it in this sense in 1997 on his Robot Wisdom weblog. (Back then, of course, we knew it as http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html.)

It is defined as "A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary."

That's the second definition, of course. The first definition for "weblog" is "A file storing a detailed record of requests handled (and sometimes also errors generated) by a web server." I remember back in the late 20th century when there was some concern people would hear the word "weblog" and not understand which sense was meant.

Thank heavens Peter Merholz came along and gave us a convenient shorthand, eh?