Great article by Meg Hourihan about blogging. She gets it, and hits on a bunch of important issues. She should get it: unlike most of the people who write about blogs, she actually has one - oh wow, and she co-founded Pyra!? Didn't even realize - shows what I know.
As bloggers, we're in the middle of, and enjoying, an evolution of communication. The traits of weblogs mentioned above will likely change and advance as our tools improve and our technology matures. What's important is that we've embraced a medium free of the physical limitations of pages, intrusions of editors, and delays of tedious publishing systems. As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it.
And she agrees with me:
When we talk about weblogs, we're talking about a way of organizing information, independent of its topic. What we write about does not define us as bloggers; it's how we write about it (frequently, ad nauseam, peppered with links).
Check out her talk about her article on her own weblog. Also some discussion on Blogroots.com.
Finally, via Blogroots again, the word blog has been added to the OED. Interestingly, because "American English plays a dominant role internationally", the Oxford English Dictionary has started a "North American Editorial Unit" to keep up.
The NAEU is also working closely with the new words group in Oxford, carefully reviewing the high-profile new words that are so often of American origin, and drafting new entries for words that have come to our attention." [including "blog"]
And see the possible origin of the word 'blog', which I never knew before.
Friday, June 14, 2002
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