Deflexion.com

I've been thinking about how to redesign my web sites and this got me thinking about what exactly is a blog. There are lots of articles about this, but here's my take on it. In 1997 Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" when he titled his site Robot Wisdom: a weblog by Jorn Barger. His site was a "log of the web" and this was the original meaning of "weblog" or "blog." Examples of this type of blog include:

1. MetaFilter.com
2. Slashdot.org
3. Open Directory Project (dmoz.org)
4. Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious.com

These sites record or log interesting places on the web. The main goal is to curate the web, to help people find interesting web pages and sites.

The word "blog" quickly evolved to mean both:

• a log of the web, and
• a log of activities, thoughts, notes, tips, essays, stories, quotes, and pretty much anything

where:

"log" means "diary" or "journal" or "listing" or "notebook" or "record"

Today "blog" is used to describe almost anything on the internet that is periodically updated. You can even think of old-fashioned .plan and .project files, which are available via the finger command, as blogs.

This means that all the streams that I produce can be thought of as blogs. Here are some of my blogs:

1. my Twitter timeline
2. my Identi.ca timeline
3. my Delicious bookmarks
4. my Blogger blog
5. my Tumblr tumblelog (which is not ready for public consumption)
6. my Infinite Ink pages (which I periodically update, although it might seem that I've abandoned them)

The first two are usually called microblogs. The third (bookmarks) is sometimes called a sideblog, The fourth is always called a blog (except by people who refuse to use the word "blog" because they don't like it from a language perspective). The fifth is usually called a tumblelog. The last, my Infinite Ink site, is not usually called a blog, but if you believe what I wrote above, it is.

For more information about the history of blogging, see:

• History of blogging timeline at Wikipedia.org
  
• weblogs: a history and perspective by Rebecca Blood

Labels: blogging, blogs, bookmarking, history, internet, terminology, twitter

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