Blog, Blogger, Blogosphere

Merriam-Webster announced this week that blog, which it defines as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was one of the most looked-up words on its internet sites this year.

This shouldn't be news. It's old news, at best. More likely, it's just a clever viral marketing ploy by M-W to get some buzz in the blogosphere. If the Blogdex is any indication, it seems to be working. The introspective blogging community is obsessively linking to this to celebrate the apparent recognition of the word blog by lexicographers.

Mark Liberman, blogging at Language Log, points out that as early as 2002 the American Dialect Society chose blog as "the word most likely to succeed".

Paul McFedries, The Word Spy, notes the earliest citation of the word:

In the old days people used to have links pages on their websites, or used to publish their bookmarks files as pages in their own right.

Weblogs are more active and tend to be updated every day. This follows the classic advice for successful web sites — update regularly to keep visitors coming back for more.

The best of them have developed their own personalities and command a loyal audience. Many of the early weblogs — commonly shortened to 'blogs — link to one another and have built up quite a community of webloggers, the authors who maintain them.

Weblogs remained fairly niche-market for a while because there was no easy way to build them. Most bloggers had to hand-code their pages each day and upload the files every time they added a new link or comment.—"The Big Byte," Evening Chronicle (Newcastle, UK), August 24, 1999

Five years later, people are still trying to find out from Merriam-Webster what the heck a blog is, anyway. Sadly, it's not in the dictionary. What does this say about the state of lexicography, when the most-looked-up word of the year—that's been used in print publications, not to mention the internet, since 1999—is not even in the dictionary?

Considering the poor definition for blog proposed to be included in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, their editors might be well-advised to spend some time this year reading these blogs.

UPDATE: Compared to the Merriam-Webster "definition" of blog as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer," the introduction to the Becker-Posner Blog includes an erudite definition of blogging:

Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.” There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.

Yep, that about sums it up.