The birth of blog

The birth of blog(The Sun)

NERDS are celebrating the anniversary of the birth of the word "blog". A geek called Peter Merholz gave birth to it nine years ago.

When I first heard the word, it brought to mind the image of a slow-witted, sluggish, thickset male, as in: "One of my cousins is a fine-featured, lively intellectual, while the other is an utter blog."

Then someone told me it actually meant "on-line diary".

Yesterday, I took the time to actually read the current generation of blogs, and realised I’d been right the first time. Most blog writers make your average coma victim look hyperactive. It’s obvious the word blog is derived from the phrase "boring as a log".

On behalf of readers, I checked out the current blogging scene. The single most common blog title, worldwide, is Musings. This is followed by Rants, Idle Thoughts, Ramblings and – this may get you wildly over-excited – Ruminations. Be still, my heart.

I clicked on to a few to see if they could be as pitifully boring as they sound. The answer was no; most were actually even more dull than they sounded.

For example, here’s a blog from a man in Singapore. "Today wake up quite late. LOL. No chance to eat breakfast. For lunch go 7-11 buy mash potato. Then went to my usual place canteen. LOL." (LOL is short for "Laugh Out Loud".)

Easily able to stop lolling at this, I eagerly clicked to another set of musings and found a blog written by a man who posts photographs of airline meals he has eaten.

He wrote about his economy class airline dessert: "It was an off-white cube which tasted of nothing, just like the previous 16 economy class airline desserts."

Then, there was a thrilling blog called Cogitations which began: "I cannot think of anything interesting to write today, so I have decided to write an essay on the subject of being unable to think of anything interesting to write about."

My advice to people who read blogs is this: if you really want a slow, painful death, it is more cost-effective to simply lower yourself into a pool of molten lava.

In seeming contradiction to this, I was amazed to discover a newspaper article explaining that blogs were a brilliant new way to win massive publishing deals.

I phoned my publisher to see if this was true. When he had finished laughing, he said: "Do the math." (This is one of his catch phrases. You say: "Good morning" to him, and he replies: "Do the math.")

I heard a rattling noise which meant he was slowly shaking his head. "Out of 1,000 manuscripts written, one gets published," he said. "Out of every million blogs published, one might turn into a book. Do ..."

"... the math. I get it already."

I phoned a financial analyst to ask his opinion. "There are 120 million blogs and more than 100,000 new blogs are registered every day in Asia alone," he said.

At this rate of growth, there will soon be no room for anything else on the Internet except the non-LOL musings of Singapore Blogger and the like.

Oh well, if you can’t beat them, join them. My blog’s going to be called "Musings of a Sad Sad Person Who Thinks the World Needs to Know That He Lunched at 7-Eleven. LOL".