{"id":1092,"date":"2020-02-28T14:54:04","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T13:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/?p=1092"},"modified":"2020-02-28T14:54:04","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T13:54:04","slug":"blogging-about-blogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/?p=1092&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Blogging about blogs"},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/em> Jess Crutchley<\/em><\/p>\n

So here I am writing a blog about writing blogs \u2013 \u201cThat\u2019s so meta,\u201d my colleague Kristin would say. After the Klein Wolf Peters team spent some time discussing blogs at our recent company workshop in Dienten<\/a>, my linguistic curiosity got the better of me and I started to wonder about the origins of the word \u201cblog\u201d.<\/p>\n

Fifteen or so years ago, \u201cblog\u201d was still one of those strange, newfangled words you\u2019d hear bandied around among young people and start-ups. But with the unrelenting growth of the online universe, the blog became a must-have for every website and anyone wanting their internet presence to attract an audience.<\/p>\n

Intuition told me that the term must somehow be derived from \u201clog\u201d \u2013 in the sense of a record or journal \u2013 but it I didn\u2019t know where it acquired its \u201cb\u201d from. After poking around the internet for a while, I was fascinated to discover that the word blog is, in fact, a shortened version of \u201cweblog\u201d, a portmanteau of the words \u201cweb\u201d and \u201clog\u201d. The Cambridge Dictionary provides the following definitions:<\/p>\n

weblog<\/a>. noun. \/\u02c8web\u02ccl\u0254\u0261\/ a website on which one person or group puts new information regularly, often every day.<\/p>\n

blog<\/a>. noun. \/bl\u0252\u0261\/ a regular record of your thoughts, opinions, or experiences that you put on the internet for other people to read.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeblog\u201d or another alternative like \u201cwebsite-log\u201d or \u201cinternet diary\u201d presumably weren\u2019t catchy enough to really take off. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, \u201cblog\u201d was coined in 1999, attributing the shortening to Peter Merholz, who wrote in the For What It\u2019s Worth section of his own website: \u201cI\u2019ve decided to pronounce the word \u2018weblog\u2019 as \u2018wee\u2019- blog. Or \u2018blog\u2019 for short.\u201d<\/p>\n

As blogs began to influence mainstream media, \u201cblog\u201d became Merriam Webster\u2019s Word of the Year in 2004: the most looked-up word in the online dictionary.<\/p>\n

Writing blogs isn\u2019t as easy as it sounds. To really make an impact, and indeed not a negative one, your writing skills really do have to be on point. Before you start typing, it\u2019s also important to identify your target audience, come up with compelling content, think about SEO and the images you want to use to consolidate your message.<\/p>\n

Here at Klein Wolf Peters, we\u2019re busy focusing on our customers so we don\u2019t publish daily blogs, but we do like to use this channel of communication to present ourselves to the world, showcase our writing skills, and echo the voice and ethos of the company. We blog about everything and anything: about language and the communication industry, about our latest company news and about anything else we think might make an interesting read. Some argue that the blogosphere is overcrowded. We disagree. Although the topics we blog about might change in line with current developments and trends, our blog itself doesn\u2019t go out of fashion.<\/p>\n

What we do know is that people these days live such busy lives that they prefer to consume information in smaller, more digestible chunks \u2013 so I\u2019ll keep this one short and sweet. We blog because we love to write and entice our readers to keep coming back for more. We\u2019re wordsmiths, so our writing speaks for itself: we don\u2019t blag it \u2013 we blog it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Musings about blogs. What are they? Why do we write them? Where does the word \u201cblog\u201d even come from? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[410,409,407,408],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1092"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1103,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions\/1103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}