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Wednesday, February 01, 2006

 
Who's a Blogger?
One of my friends is a reporter for a smallish newspaper at an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest. He noticed an interesting word-meaning phenomenon, which I shall allow him to report in his own words, (though with names obscured, since the person being talked about is unaware that what he has done is either interesting or being blogged about.)
Last year, my current managing editor, C., was told to improve his paper's website, and so he decided that his paper (my current paper) should have one of those blog things everybody has been talking about. Since our paper is quite small (less than 20 reporters, including the sports stringers), this was pretty progressive of him.

But I'm almost positive that C. doesn't read blogs. He doesn't read much about them, either, except in specialized media publications that probably assume their readers all read blogs.

So somewhere along the way, he seems to have gotten the idea that "blogger" refers to anyone who posts a comment on a blog.

The funny thing is that, as a result of the promotional copy that C. has composed for the site and the paper, almost all our users have adopted his definition. They call one another bloggers. They call their posts "blogs." C. has inadvertently created a city of forty-five thousand people that has its own definition of a word.
So, are you a blogger?

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