While eating my lunch, I began wondering - as you do - who the person was that first came up with the term “weblog”. A baguette and a chocolate bar later, and following a visit to Wikipedia, I have been informed (or as informed as you can be by an encyclopedia written by anybody and everybody).
It turns out the term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17th 1997. All very interesting, but not as interesting as something else he also did…
The Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth
The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post… and vice versa
While we might transpose “Usenet” for “Blogosphere” now, all of us who write blogs know the above law to be true. Writing is secondary to living - and therefore while we may sometimes make a note to “blog about this”, we invariably forget.
Ergo, the most influential bloggers have no life. It’s a rather neat defence actually, isn’t it - the relative anonymity of your blog reflects favourably on the richness and quality of your life.
Of course, if you have no visitors and no life… that just sucks.