Blog has become a meaningless word.

Back in the early days — he says, leaning on his cane — blog had a fairly specific meaning. Before the creation of useful search engines we all relied on a loose network of sites to find the good stuff on-line. A "weblog" was a page (or pages) with short, reverse-chronological entries directing the reader to sites or pages the author found interesting. Occasionally editorial advice would be included, but that was not the norm.

Digital journals had been around before that, and earlier still there were personal sites of various types. We used to say "I have a website," or "I've got a webpage." A blog may have been a part of that, but it wasn't the thing itself. My own first sites were hand-coded — yes, knowledge of HTML was a requirement back then! — and focused on my hobbies of the time, along with a little personal writing. Nonetheless, when Pyra Labs introduced their Blogger site it didn't take me long to become an early adopter. I was so pleased I even paid for the service, and I still have my Blogger Pro stuff around here somewhere to prove it.

Blogger's simplicity of use — and that of the similar services that followed — made web sites accessible to many people who couldn't be bothered to learn HTML. With the later creation of the BlogSpot hosting service there wasn't even any need to own or configure a domain. Given the plethora of tools available today to enable painless publishing, for most people there's no point in learning to code, and no reason not to publish.

Features were added to Blogger and BlogSpot and the other services as technology changed our lives. Digital cameras made it easy for anyone to take pictures, and blogging tools gave you a way to show the world your new baby (literal or figurative). As web access speeds increased, so did the feasibility of showing your home movies, too. Soon enough almost any kind of content you could imagine was easily added to your personal web site.

But "personal web site" is five syllables, and "blog" is one, so it's easy to see who won that etymological slugfest.

Now a blog can be anything. There are photography sites with word counts approaching zero that are called blogs. There are sites with staffs of paid writers reporting on local news, and they are called blogs. There are corporate sites regurgitating their press releases as blog entries. A site without any original content at all, but merely linking to stories on other sites, is also a blog. A series of movies, citizen journalism, webcams, personal essays, corporate marketing: almost anything available on the web is now a blog, it seems.

Still, it's hard for me to think of what I do here as blogging. I write whatever I want to write, on any topic. I use blogging software to publish on the web, on domains I own. The stories are dated, with the most recent at the top. But is it really blogging?

Language is a living thing, though — it's a virus, according to William S. Burroughs. Its purpose is to facilitate communication, and there can't be communication if we aren't using the same definitions. I can be as pedantic as I like, smugly noting that (with apologies to Inigo Montoyo), "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." But to what purpose?

So I give up. You win, world. I own a website; my words appear there; ergo, I am a blogger.

I've been called worse.

In related news, it's time for the annual South Florida Daily Blog 2009 Post of the Year. While I still have reservations about calling all the nominees blogs, the term doesn't change the quality of the work nominated. There's some good stuff here, and I don't just say that because I was graced with a nomination (December, #10 in the list, vote for me). Take a few minutes, relax, and wander through some of the best content created by South Florida's bloggers in 2009. (Really, it's okay if you vote for me, I won't be offended. Think of it as a very inexpensive birthday present for an old man.)