If you'll allow me to be extremely pedantic for a second: blog is short for weblog, not web log. Famed blogger Jason Kottke agrees; in fact, he's claimed that weblog predates web log.

And hey! This isn't just speculation! The Wayback Machine can actually show us the very first instance of the word blog:

For What It's Worth
I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee'- blog. Or "blog" for short.

(That was in 1999.)

When I was writing my master's thesis on diary weblogs ("How to be Unemployed for Three Months After Graduation"), I encountered the web log canard countless times. Even Wikipedia gets this wrong — I'd fix that myself, but I've dealt with hardcore Wikipedians before, and correcting the first sentence of the Blog article sounds less like a good deed and more like a nasty dare.

I've been thinking about bloggy etymologies lately because today is the first blogiversary of Notes from the Copy Editor. Reading through the above rant was your present to me. Very thoughtful of you.

Unfortunately, the origin of blogiversary and its variants is still murky, and likely to get murkier as time passes and more old blogs go offline or are buried by new websites.

Some people claim that the blog TalkLeft coined blogiversary, and it probably did popularize it, but I couldn't find any mention of that word there before this June 2003 post. Elsewhere on the web, I managed to find a December 2001 cite for blogiversary and a September 2001 cite for the variant blogaversary. Let me know in the comments if you've found anything earlier.

Anyways, for the curious and lazy, here's my first real post.

Also, thanks to everyone who's read and/or linked to this blog in the past year. It's been nice to have an outlet for my English geekitude.

Labels: etymology