Weblog, not wobble, wabble, bulg or bloop

This morning I went for a long, wet, buggy (there's no escaping it) walk with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for many months. In catching up with our lives, I naturally felt compelled to tell her about blogging. ‘What’s that?’ she asks. And so I describe it in the usual manner: I explain what it is NOT. No, it’s not a journal. No, I never skip a day. No, no, I am the sole author of it, no one else weighs in. Though they do in other blogs. Sometimes. And so on.

Why is it that Merriam-Webster online offers so little help here? Look up ‘weblog’ and you’ll be redirected to wobbling or wabbling. For ‘blog’ you may be told to switch the spelling to blob or bloop. Wonderful.

How is it that such a vast majority of the computer-using public knows nothing of blogging? Trends emerge, some disappear of course, but typically there is great fanfare surrounding them. Clothes, gadgets, we KNOW what’s capturing the collective imagination. Bloggers, on the other hand, reside in a self-sustaining world. Sometimes I forget how contained within our own circle of readers we really are.