Sunday, July 15, 2007

links for 2007-07-15

• HorsePigCow: The Dinner Party: Individual vs. Collective
  "Everything was delightful up until the moment the bill arrived. It’s been several years since I’ve had such an awkward bill splitting experience." [via Torrez]
• The check we all want to write
  What now, bitches?
  (tags: humor)
• Video: Male Restroom Etiquette
  As told by The Sims. Brilliant! "So there they are, standing at the urinals, discussing the advantages of Open Source development..."
  (tags: humor video)
• Happy Blogiversary - WSJ.com: It's been 10 years since the blog was born.
  "Twelve commentators—including Tom Wolfe, Newt Gingrich, the SEC's Christopher Cox and actress-turned-blogger Mia Farrow—on what blogs mean to them." (Ugh. "Blogiversary"? Really? That's the word you're going with?)
  (tags: weblogcommunity weblog)

Monday, June 11, 2007

Another anniversary, of sorts, coming up

This coming Saturday, it will have been eight years since I published a braindump I called Why I Weblog. The piece grew from a post and dialog on the earliest weblog-related listserv, was linked to by a lot of folks who were doing this sort of thing back in the day, and three years later was even published in a book.

I concluded my ramblings with this thought:

As the weblog movement matures, our sites will wrest editorial authority from the few editors of today and divide it among the many. “They” can continue to publish the chaff; we’ll be there to point our hungry readers toward the wheat. Hopefully, we’ll have fun doing it and learn a lot along the way.

And so it goes, my friends. And so it goes. Try not to let a day go by without having fun and learning while we’re revolutionizing the media, okay?

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?