Language evolves. New words arise to meet changing needs, old ones are adapted or discarded along the way, and the faster the change in the area of need, the faster new words arise. And that’s before we get into arguments over functionality illiteracy and laziness being used as an excuse to mangle the language. No really, let’s not. Of course the technology/media/content industry is about the planet’s prime culprit here – if a techie Rip van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1985 and had just come to, he or she would be somewhere twixt boggled and brainfried. But at least ForTran‘s still around…
This time it started with “blogging”, a contracted conflation (contraflation?) of “web logging”, itself a verbification of something many of us had been doing for years, quite happily and without feeling the need for the naming of names – the doing of things being more important. In essence though, “blogging” is the creation of dynamically updated web site content through the medium of an automated content management system. It’s perception ranges from being the reinvention of journalism in a post-post-literate society to a vanity publishing tool for the geek-at-heart. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive. What it has done is to create a massive and large accessible resource of information and opinion, plus mechanisms for its distribution and connection, which contains essential lessons for organisations in today’s emergent and adaptive environments. Polemic over for the moment and back to the -oggness of things: