May 27, 2004
Blog
The NY Times Thursday “Circuits” section reports not only the latest cyberations, but sometimes on the psyches of those of us who’re hooked on their manifestations. This morning’s edition says we daily email pontificators are bloggers, and that we are obsessed and addicted and ignore our families with our craze to make ourselves heard or read or whatever.
And all the while I’d thought I was fulfilling not just another addiction, but a dream come true to become a writer. But maybe it’s only the old east Texas country preacher once removed wandering around in me somewhere wishing he had some pews and a pulpit six feet above contradiction.
“Blog” (short for weblog, I suspect) has little appeal as a name for anything. It certainly doesn’t appeal to me. But if it just comes down to publishing, I prefer the self-serving and embarrassing “Vanity Press” a lot more.
I wish I’d seen the NY Times article. Since I haven’t, I’m responding without knowing what the original said. So I could be missing the article’s point. But -
A “blog” is indeed short for “weblog”.
Daily email newsletters are not necessarily blogs. In email, the writer composes a message and then sends it. The readers read it using an email client like Mozilla or Eudora or Outlook. But the email itself doesn’t normally sit anywhere permanently unless the recipient keeps a copy.
Weblogs are pieces of writing which normally reside more-or-less permanently on a web page. They aren’t emailed as a matter of course, although they can be emailed. People read the blog entry by going to that web page. To simplify the process, if someone reads a lot of blogs, they can can get a blog client - often known as a “feed reader” - that will go to the web sites for them and check the blogs to see if anything new has been posted, fetch the new item(s) and show them.
The archives of Out of Nowhere are a weblog. Out of Nowhere itself is email. It’s copied to the blog so it has a permanent home.
And back to the crazed bloggers who ignore their families - aren’t authors in other formats equally likely to be crazed? It’s just that the cost of entry for a blogger is a lot less than for someone who wants to write a printed book.
Blogs are conversations. People like to have conversations with other people. Blogs are another way to find out what someone else is feeling and thinking. That’s one of the reasons why blogs are currently very popular.
- Marsha
Comment by Marsha Williams — May 27, 2004 @ 12:13 pm