The Wall Street Journal (which I'll admit I never read, but was tipped off to this article by a real life acquaintance's blog) has an article celebrating the birthday of the blog.
We are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word "weblog."Well, it looks like the WSJ is a bit early in its birthday wishes. The 10 year anniversary will come in December, about the time my blog turns 3. I did find it interesting that the article pointed out one of my pet peeves:
the spell check on Microsoft Word has yet to awaken to the concept of the blog. Type in "blogging," for instance, and you will promptly earn a disapproving underscore in red, with the suggestion that "bogging," "clogging," "flogging" or "slogging" (unappetizing alternatives all) might, in truth, be the word you seek.At least the blogger spell check knows that "blog" is a word, although it still thinks the adjective "bloggy" is not a word. It wants me to change it to "boggy." For that matter, looking at post in the editing mode I see that blogger also wants me to change "blogosphere" to "biosphere" and "weblog" to "we blog" or "web log". Hmmm ...
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