This will be short, because this topic is over-done, and has little direct relevance to you.
The word ‘blog’ is trending downwards as a search term, and it’s good that it’s going away, because it was always a little too technical.
When we look over the historical record, we notice that our ancestors, even average people, wrote much longer letters than we tend to write today. Even private love letters tended to be quite involved.
Modern blogs simply hop into the same niche that was formerly occupied by the long, often-shared, letters that people wrote to their personal and professional connections. E-mail and other notes mostly jump into the spot held by the memo, the telegram, and the hand-delivered message.
It has been sometimes said that the letter-writing impulse had evaporated. It hasn’t. It just re-asserted itself in another medium.
Historians will use blogs from our period in the same way that they use letter archives to piece together a historical narrative. Journalists like to flatter themselves by saying that they write the ‘first draft of history,’ but that first draft always has to be checked against more reliable private archives which can be cross-checked against one another.
Blog posts are simply digitally carbon copied to more people at once, and archived by automated librarians.
I remember what an ugly, jarring word I thought “blog” to be when I first heard it, though I enjoyed the medium…at least it not quite as bad as “vlog”.
“Web-log” makes more sense than “blog,” but hopefully the entire term will die and be replaced.
Blog post: epistle (article?)
Blog: epistolary? epistolocus?
Blogger: epistolarian.
So we need a name. “E-tters” anyone?
…almost as terrible as “blog”
I can finally call myself an epistolarian instead of “blogger.” What is a blog then, an epistolary? An epistolocus?