Some interesting dialogue on what we call this thing we do.

Steve from www.sasane.com has started a discussion on finding a more elegant term to replace "blogging" as the verb used to describe writing and posting on-line.

To my way of thinking, the question actually goes a little deeper, semantically speaking, to the way we use (and abuse) language. That "blogging" has risen through the syntactic murk to become the verb is not surprising. In fact, from the noun "weblog" to the verb "blog" is a rather handy shorthand that online diarists. columnists and others can use to describe this. The downside is that, like "faxing," "accessing," "incenting" etc., we've managed to smudge the lines between nouns and verbs in the interest of making life lexicographically easier.

I think that this gerundization of the English language, while it rubs me wrong from a "words and their meanings" perspective, is an inevitable side effect of living in a world where more than 5 exabytes of new information were created last year alone . That's 800 MB of new crap for every person in the world. We're to be forgiven for taking some shortcuts here and there.

All of this not withstanding, I still agree with Steve that the word "blog" has something of a splatty quality and finding something new to call it would be a good thing. At the same time, I'd love to see a world where the verb that describes what we members of the blogosphere do here is different from the noun that describes the repository for those actions.