blog, blecch
When I tell people about this website, I still hesitate whenever referring to it as my blog. The thing is, I really hate that word. ‘Blog’ incites visions of the nearly endless wasteland of garbage.blogspot.com sites that were started in March of 2004 and fell into disrepair a half-dozen posts and two pageviews later. It was a trendy term back in its heyday, but now it’s blanketed over far too many types of websites.
If it isn’t obvious, I spend a fair bit of time keeping up technochocolate, hopefully more than your average blogspot.com offering. It’s a place where I can write, think, share, and exercise my creative muscles. Even more than my site, it makes me cringe whenever I refer to the site of someone who writes professionally online as a ‘blog’. Some responses to an offhanded post I made on Twitter suggest I’m not the only one who disdains the term.
When I try to boil down the broader category of websites that technochocolate falls into outside of the context of the Internet, they could be pretty accurately described as self-published, editorial columns. Wouldn’t that be a mouthful. But hey, column isn’t bad. Is that too misleading? How about webcolumn?
Upon further reflection, this is how many people treat these websites already. Many of us don’t read magazines, but we’re assembling them ourselves all the time. By combining things like RSS, Twitter lists, and other social networks with tools like Reeder, Instapaper, and Flipboard we stand as editors over our own content stream all the time. John Gruber is a columnist for my magazine, so is Shawn Blanc, Ben Brooks, and many others. I get more value from the columnists I read than loads of people with journalism degrees.
I’m certainly not the first person to use the term webcolumn, but I’m going to try it on for size. If you like it, you should run with it too.
Welcome to technochocolate, a webcolumn about chocolatey smooth technology and other stuff by Chuck Skoda.