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July 10, 2003
Origins of 'weblog' and 'blog'
This one's more for me (want to log it for the record), but some of you may be interested too. Responses to a question on the (for internet research) about the origins of the terms "weblog" and "blog" have pointed to Jorn Barger and Peter Merholz, respectively as the source for each. While Barger doesn't really take credit for "weblog" on his site (robotwisdom), Wired gives him that explicit credit in February 2000 in this article: While declining to provide precise numbers, Jorn Barger, who publishes Robot Wisdom, one of the oldest and most popular weblogs, and who coined the term weblog, said his daily traffic has grown to tens of thousands from the mere hundreds when he started in 1998. PeterMe does take credit for "blog" on his own weblog here: As such, it's weird to experience how my love of words and wordplay has actually made an impact. Sometime in April or May of 1999 (I can't say for sure when I exactly did it), I posted, in the sidebar of my homepage: In this same post, Peter credits the Blogger folks with keeping "blog" from dying "a forgotten death," but I bet it would have succeeded regardless. Anyways, just wanted to file this...bet it might come in handy when I take Nancy Kaplan's class on information culture in the fall!
Comments
Just when do we expect these two words together with 'blogging' to enter the English language (and other) dictionaries? :) -- Posted by mentor cana on July 11, 2003 08:34 PMsyllables in english like to have onset consonants. a common example being that most people pronounce Long Island as Long Guy-land. futhermore, english has many onset consonant clusters "st", "gr", etc ("bl" being a less common combination) which are also very sticky. in otherwords when the last sound in one word and the first sound in the following word (of a phrase) make up a common consonant cluster, the two sounds tend to bind together on the second word. thus when people coined the term "weblog" and said it repeatedly, there is a natural tendency for that 'b' to stick onto the latter syllable, expecially if it's getting more stress than the first. so even though peterme says he decided "to shift the syllabic break" it more likely was a quite natual phonological phenomena. and the more stress the latter syllable got, the less important the first became, especially since 'blog' alone is a novel word in english (to my knowledge). -- Posted by justin on July 14, 2003 01:36 AM
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IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .
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