&#39;Blog&#39; Is Runaway Word Of Year
11854
(CBS/AP) It&#39;s possible you may have looked at a &quot;blog&quot; to help make your decision whether re-elect the &quot;incumbent&quot; during the recent &quot;electoral&quot; process.
468825
In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
247331
About 32 million people in the US read a blog in 2004 but less than half of Americans know what a blog is, says a survey.
496281
Since most people using the MSN Spaces service are are just getting their weblogs up and running, it&#39;s not easy to tell what a full-fledged blog on the site will look like.
68827
'Bugger off out the office' FoTW Oh dear, oh dear - it appears CNET's blogging pundits are not actually a legitimate target for us proper hacks, those of us who've done English O-Level and read a couple of novels.â¦
728705
Bloggers are creating a massive chronicle of daily life, filled with stories and, of course, rants.
476522
In the US, we hasten to add The truly repulsive "w00t" has been crowned Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007 - based on "thousands" of votes from visitors to the dictionary's website.â¦
176404
The electoral shorthand for a divided America and the perceived nastiness of the U.S. presidential race generated the defining words and phrases of the year, a Web site specializing in language said on Friday.
664003
Please quote me on this Stob There's another of those lists of supposedly amusing/sage/cute adagesÂ going around, bouncing from blog to email, accumulating fresh contributions and occasional edits and doing all the meme-ish things that memes do. This one differs from all the others that you have deleted irritably from your email inbox in that it includes a contribution taken from this very column.â¦
276834
US Dictionary Merriam-Websterâs has announced that the word âblogâ is their word of the year in their annual pronouncement of the Top 10 words of 2004, which also bizarrely included the words cicada and defenestration.
320730
I'm starting to realize that my blog is a bit of a time machine.  For example I can create a blog entry to warn myself about something that WILL happen in the future.    My current NTP  blog entry is a good example.  I wrote this for myself as much as for the people who read my blog (or find me via Google).  I know for sure that NTP on Debian is going to bite me sometime in the future and I'm going to forget WHY.  Then I'm going to (of course) go to Google or my aggregator and search for NTP and then find my blog post.    I've done this about a dozen times now and its saved me a TON of time!
390989
The Obama Express. My latest piece on Huffington.  If you like it, please feel free to pass it on.  "cheesecake"
577640
Merriam-Webster set the blogosophere buzzing this week with its announcement that the word âblogâ was among the most looked-up words of the year. The curious hordes were likely puzzled, however, by Merriam-Websterâs definition: âa Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks.â
21803
short for &quot;Weblog&quot; -- was the most-frequently requested definition at Merriam-Webster&#39;s online dictionary site, the publisher says.
139707
It may be a little late to the game, but business travel is now the subject of a variety of blogs.
198611
Hot competition for word of the year Lovers of the English language in all its glory have until 31 January to vote for the online Macquarie Dictionary word of the year from a spendid selection of neologisms and rather more familiar terms.â¦
718178
MSN Spaces Blog Service Launches  What better day to announce a new blogging service than the day when we all learned that "blog" was the most popular word for an online dictionary. Was 2004 the year of the blog? If it was, MSN has found a great way to end it ...