Blogging

The Fascination With the Ugly Name

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Last Updated on December 30, 2014

Does the word ‘blog’ bother you? A recent article calls it an “ugly name” for a fascination that attracts many. What do you like better as a name?

Back when this blog started, it was hosted on AOL’s platform, AOL Journals. Many of us who started there — most likely because of some silly loyalty toward the AOL community — hated the word blog.

We thought it sounded terrible. Journal sounded so much nicer, we thought.

Blog, as you probably already know, originated as an abbreviation of “web log,”&nbsp which doesn’t sound much better. But some say blog is just an ugly name, any way you slice it.

There were actually some of us who became offended if anyone dared refer to our journals as blogs. The problem with referring to them as “journals” is that it leads many who have a little too high an opinion of their writing to call themselves “journalists.”

Technically, they probably are “journalists,” but we also know that the word journalist has a very different connotation in regards to the journalism business, and I suspect there are more than a few bloggers who don’t mind blurring that distinction in the hope of obtaining a level of undeserved credibility.

As I’ve said before, a blogger can be a journalist when he practices journalism.

Most of us don’t.

An element of my real job now is actually being a journalist. What I do here, however, is not journalism.

As much as we might have disliked the name blog, when a few issues came up in AOL’s “J-Land,” our nickname for its blogging platform, a group of us decided to defect to Blogger.

Here’s a little inconvenient truth: it’s a lot more difficult to maintain your avoidance of the word blog when you use a platform called Blogger.

Go figure.

Suddenly, as you might have guessed, the objections to the word seemed to fade. Most of us, I think, didn’t really realize it happened. We just came to call our sites blogs rather than journals.

Kind of like the way your arms, once you pass age 40, just get shorter without you realizing it until you go to check the date on your wristwatch and realize you can’t get the watch far enough away to bring the date into focus anymore. You don’t wake up one day needing reading glasses when you had perfect sight the day before.

It’s a process, but it happens.

Since switching to WordPress years ago, I’ve had no problem with the word blog. I’m proud to call myself a blogger. I’d be prouder if I could call myself a money-making blogger, but that’s another post for another day.

But, yes, I no longer consider blog to be an ugly name.

Just don’t get me started on vlog.

Your Turn:

Do you think blog is an “ugly name” for a site, or do you embrace the name?

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.