What do I call this thing?

I don’t like the word “blog.” There’s some­thing about the com­bi­na­tion of the let­ters b, l, o, and g, and the way they feel when I say it that just puts me off. Blog. Bloooooooog. Sounds like some­one retch­ing. Online vom­it­ing. (Which is an accu­rate descrip­tion of some of them, I sup­pose.) More than that, what I’m doing here is not what I think of when I hear the word.

I’ve been “online” for a long time. Our first home com­puter was a 286 Mag­navox something-or-other, back when a 286 was the best you could get. My first online access was Prodigy and some BBS’s, fol­lowed by AOL. When the first web logs started show­ing up, they were lit­tle more than a col­lec­tion of links to other sites, with maybe some com­men­tary, but mainly links. And ter­ri­ble designs, but that’s another mat­ter. So, when I think about a “blog,” I pic­ture a bunch of short entries with links to other blogs or funny pic­tures of cats or ani­mated .gifs that take for­ever to load…

That’s not what I do here. At least, not yet. I may devolve into that at some point, but I’m try­ing to stay away from it. I use Twit­ter for my inter­net regur­gi­tat­ing. I’m reminded now of Diary-X. In a world where blog­ging ser­vices were pop­ping up every­where, D-X wanted to focus on longer entries, much like a jour­nal. The max­i­mum num­ber of posts shown on the page at a time was exactly one (1), in the hopes that it would fos­ter a more insight­ful, well-read inter­net. I seem to be doing that, but with a more bloggy for­mat. I’m sure there’s a way to set Word­Press to dis­play only the most cur­rent entry, but I’d have to fig­ure out a way to add some nav­i­ga­tion links, and I think I’m too lazy to do so.

So, with all that super­flu­ous non­sense said, what do I call this? It’s not a blog (if only because I don’t want it to be a blog.) It’s not a blag. It’s not exactly a jour­nal and my inner 12 year old boy still thinks a diary is a girl thing. I could call it my “online pres­ence” but that’s hard to refer to casu­ally. “Check out my online pres­ence at hallowdmachine.com.” “Hey guys, I updated my O.P.” Nope, not going to work. “Web­site” or “site” could work, but it seems a bit gen­eral, not to men­tion any­thing “web” sounds so 1997. Hell, a lot of sites don’t even require the www. at the begin­ning of the URL any­more. “Domain” is even more gen­eral than “site.”

It’s time to turn to the inter­tubes, which is pretty meta. Ask­ing the inter­net what I should call my inter­net… thing. Sorry, I’m con­fus­ing myself.

I Googled “another word for blog”. Let’s see what we have here.

This adver­tis­ing agency is call­ing it “Intel­li­gence”. Inter­est­ing, but a bit pre­ten­tious. I can’t guar­an­tee that every­thing I put up here will be intel­li­gent, or even mar­gin­ally clever.

This post, dated March 2007, details why one per­son doesn’t think jour­nal­ism columns should not be called blogs. No help there.

After that, Google just served up a bunch of hits that have “blog” and “another word” in the titles but aren’t “another word for blog.” Next, I tried search­ing for a syn­onym for blog.

Synonym.com only has an entry for blog as a verb, giv­ing me com­mu­ni­cate and inter­com­mu­ni­cate. Meh. Synonyms.net is even less help­ful. That’s not going to work.

It appears today is not the day that I coin a new inter­net word to describe what­ever it is I’m doing here. I’ll con­tinue to refer to this space gener­i­cally as “my site,” where I “write posts.” I will admit that blog is con­ve­nient, being both a noun and a verb at the same time. “I’m blog­ging on my blog” would be a very silly thing to say, however.

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Word count: 644 | Sen­tences: 65 | Fog: 7.7 | Kin­caid: 4.5 | Flesch: 80