Blog this, blog that

Confusion and controversy continue to rage over what's a blog, at least among the people my other day job encounters (web designers and developers). There were diaries, journals, and logs. Now there are logs online, or web logs, used as diaries or journals. The nouns diary and journal have overlapping dictionary definitions, however, a diary is only personal and a journal can be a publication. A log is a record of performance, such as a ship's speed. Add to this the fact that some journalists (in the news writing sense) are publishing blogs, blurring traditional delineations and definitions. Also, as I wrote on July 30 in Professional, Amateur, or Other?, any online writing, however rotten it's written, is considered published.

It's mostly the techies who are objecting to diarists, journalists, and businesses usurping the "blog" name for their publications. Early blogs were frequent, sometimes clandestine, postings of technological insights and news, arcane to non-techies. Geek-speak. I suspect they existed long before the web was invented in 1989, but I don't know what they were called when we had to Kermit them around and reach them by Telnet.

The techies seem to forget, however, that they usurped the term "log" from ship and plane pilots who logged the performance of their crafts long before even the Internet existed.

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