When a blog is not a blog: the survey results
Last week I solicited your votes and comments in a survey about usage of the word blog.
My main interest was in finding out if copyeditors and editors had a consensus on whether it’s fine to use blog to mean a single, dated, first-person post on a web site instead of using blog to mean an entire site of such posts. That latter is the usage I prefer.
The response was great: 195 people completed the survey, mostly from
the United States but also from Canada, the UK, the Philippines, and
Singapore.
Of course, I biased the whole affair by hammering away at my opinion before asking the questions. To the pollster go the spoils!
Much to my relief, in finishing the statement “in my place of work, our house style is,” 73% (143) said that “a blog is an entire site, or a section of a site, that collects multiple dated, first-person posts or entries.”
Of editors, 18% (36) said the same, with only 2% (3) of editors and 2.6% (5) of all respondents saying that blog
could be a single post rather than a whole site. (In order to keep
things flexible, I allowed multiple responses in all places, so some
people are counted twice for different answers to the same question.)
Only 8% (16) of everyone said a blog could be either a single post or an entire site.
I also asked whether survey-takers thought certain sentences sounded okay with various uses of the word blog. Some of the sentences were intentionally ambiguous, which many of you pointed out.
In fact, that whole section was a bit of a red herring.
For the entire run of its life, blog is one of those words
that has been appearing on list of words people hate. Those sentences
were intended to simply give you a wide variety of basic usage examples —
some of them almost word-for-word from email I have received or from
various places on the Internet — so that when you answered the question
about like and dislike of the word blog, you’d have some material to work with. The ways of the pollster are legion.
It turns out that more than three-quarters of respondents expressed neutral feelings — or was it resignation? — about the word blog as a word. It was called ugly or distasteful by 17.5% (34) of respondents. Only two people called it pretty.
There were also a good number of comments. Here’s a sample:
Editorially, a blog is the collection of posts, but the
web development department uses the word to describe a single entry.
This led to some level of misunderstanding during a site redesign where
we (edit) were thinking one thing and they (web development) were
thinking another. The end result was a poorly designed blog
functionality where every blog entry is collected into a single frame of
the page without any means of distinguishing who wrote what.
I had a similar thing happen. A family member (who shall remain
unnamed) was remarking upon having made three new blogs in a week, and I
thought,”Doesn’t that person know they can just make a new entry? Do
they really think they have to create an entire new blog site every
time?” I could just envision that person going to Blogger and going
through the whole new blog signup process every time. Turns out, that
usage is normal in her world.
More comments from respondents:
I think that a word is needed for the concept and I use the word “blog” because others do but I really don’t like the word.
Didn’t know this was a problem. Hope you can stop it before it reaches the world.
Pet peeve: Blog readers/commenters who think that
“blogging” describes what they’re doing. I reserve the term “blogger”
for people who write blog posts, not for their audience.
Blog is a silly, icky word, but it’s the word we have.
But it does seem silly to use it to refer to a single post. If I write a
page in my ink-and-paper journal, I don’t say “I wrote a journal.” But I
do say “I journaled.” Hrm.
In my line of work, columns are taken seriously and
blogs are for teenagers on MySpace. When you work with a marketing type,
the buzzword will pull in guest bloggers, but when you work with the
professional, they only want to contribute as a guest columnist. When
submitted, posts labeled blogs are typically less-refined than those
labeled columns.
If you’d like to see all the comments and the full, raw results, and maybe do your own analysis, they are posted here.
All responses were anonymous, except for the person who identified
themselves as “Jorn Barger,” who may or may not have actually been Jorn.
If you’ve got something to say, leave a comment below or drop us a line at copydesk@copyediting.com.
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Tags: blog, entries, language, posts, results, survey, usage
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on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 7:12 am and is filed under Copyediting -- Because Language Matters.
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One Response to “When a blog is not a blog: the survey results”
JUST faced this issue when trying to compose a tweet about
someone’s blog entry. Thanks for the clarification! I used the word
“piece”, it wasn’t quite a “column” but, “entry” would have served me
well. Going to go google where the heck “Blog” came from anyway. Count
me as one who thinks the word is ugly! …images of Bog, Blah, Bleck,
Grog,….ugh!
Jody Frisby says: