It's going to get asked sometime so I might as well write on it in advanced:
"Why arn't you using xanga, blogger.com, or <insert-favorite-journal-service-here>?"
You know what? I hate the word "blog." WTF is a "blog"? "bleh-log?" Somebody misspelled "bog"? Some ass trying to be cool and giving something a name that sounds vauge.... like "blob"? How the hell do you come up with a word that non-intuitive and lame-sounding at the same time?
When I first heard it used as a word, it made no sense to me. I go to a page from google after naturally searching the word "blog" and I just find a bunch of random posts. And I'm like, okay, so there's some guy's journal. Nice. Doesn't have too much stuff there. Now what's the "blog" thing people are talking about? It took me a whole week to figure out that the journal is the "blog"! Dammit. How was I supposed to know that it's "weblog" shorted by arbitrarily cutting off two letters? If you're going to abbreviate something, that's certainly not right since it's obviously more intuitive to use letters from the front of each component of a compound word. Even with my shitty English skillz, I can tell you that.
All of a sudden, lots of software came out written by people who thought "blogging" is such a new and cool idea. (news flash: it's a journal, just like what everybody's been doing since the stone ages, so stop acting like it's new.) And so the name seems to have stuck. At the same time, "xanga.com" got started.... and people verbed that word too. WTF IS XANGA SUPPOSED TO MEAN? What? It's cool cuz it's got an X in the name? Sounds eXXXXXXtreme, doesn't it? Freakin' a..... You know, I totally would have been cool about it if it stayed as just a name of a website that provides webspace for creating journals. But for somebody to come up to me and say "hey, dude, check it out, I just started xangaing," just totally ruined it.
And don't get me started on "moblog".....
Anyways, years ago, Lisa told me that writing a diary/journal would be something good to help me practice my writing skills and record down stuff I've thought about over the years. That recently coincided with the mixing of a bunch of personal projects ideas I've had, the need to organize, index, and post them, and also my increasing use of my digital camera, as well as the "oh, i'll start making a decent webpage someday." So, all together, this webpage is supposed to be a record of all those cool things I did in my free time and whatever crap I can think of. And how much I hate the word "blog."
For the last time. It's a journal. It's a diary. It's a weblog. "Blog" is not a word. Use it and I'll be forced to slap you silly with a large trout.
Posted by hachu at September 8, 2004 01:50 PMHeh. Writing is good for you. :)
Well if they didn't call it a blog they'd have to call it wlog, and that doesn't work does it? ;b It sounds faintly obscene actually.
But that said, I don't think I say blog very much. I usually refer to mine as my journal.
I'd like to see you slap anyone with a trout!
Posted by: lisa at October 13, 2004 11:51 AM