“Weblog” Term Celebrates Tenth Birthday

It’s sometimes hard to believe how quickly things move; it was only ten years ago that a certain word was coined, and yet some people now use an abbreviated form of it a dozen (or more) times a day.  The word, of course, is "weblog."

The BBC attributes weblog’s existence to Jorn Barger, who was involved in "the ‘logging’ of interesting ‘web’ sites."  We wish Barger had thought of some combination that was a little more pleasant-sounding.  Still, the importance of weblogs is impossible to deny.

Think about it: they are the way in which some of the most powerful companies in the world communicate with the public.  Things also work in the other direction, with unknown people putting down their thoughts and getting noticed by international organizations.

Admittedly, those uses goes more into the substance of weblogs than the name, but, well, whatever.  The BBC adds, "Technorati, which keeps an eye on the blogosphere, estimates that there are now 120,000 new blogs being created every day.  Posts are being added to blogs at a rate of 17 per second – a total of 1.5 million per day, says the firm."

Ten years from now, perhaps we’ll be writing about the anniversary of "ogs" and be dealing with numbers in the billions.