Words are not concepts. Words are the codes we choose to represent concepts. The apparent thing is that different people use different codes for same concepts, i.e. they have different words for the same concepts in different languages. But the non-apparent thing is equally usual. The word for a given concept might start being used for a different concept. Now this seems weird, because theoretically it would be pretty confusing if the concepts that our codes represent keep changing all the time; that would make communication all the difficult. But it happens all the time. Codes remain; concepts don't.
The problem, for now, is what to do if you have a concept in mind, for which their was a word, but that word started getting used for something else - a different concept. The reason the code got switched for another concept in the first place, was that the initial concept had gotten out of fashion and thus some other more fashionable concept had acquired its code. By fashion, I do not intend to associate any subjective preferences of mine, but rather I intend to define it as a representation of what people at a given point in time and space interact more frequently with. Thus, this initial concept which lost its code is something not a lot of people are frequently interacting with. But those who want to interact with it, I think, should choose a new code for it; otherwise the concept they want to interact with will dissolve its identity with the new concept that had acquired its code. That's what I think.
Luckily, the concept I have in my mind used to have a somewhat longer code which got shortened out, but the shortened out code got acquired by a more fashionable concept, so I thought that the original unshortened version of the code might be good to represent that very concept.
That was the preface to today's blog entry.
Weblog is a code I have decided to use to represent the concept which is quite different from the concept which is nowadays commonly represented by the word blog. Weblog in its strict sense is a log on the web. That is a fair enough decoding of the code and representation of the concept, but here are a few other things:-
- Weblog is a personal project.
- It is mostly a log of observations, thoughts, ideas, and/or activities of the person.
- The weblog is primarily intended for a very limited audience. The weblogs would either be about things that only they would find interesting who find that person interesting (friends and potential friends), or that they could revolve around a niche area, so that only those people interested in that niche would find the weblog somewhat interesting.
The code weblog got shortened to blog, but it kept representing the same idea. But what this code represented started changing in 2010s and by late 2010s, the concept it represented was totally different.
As of now, the word blog usually represents a portal for corporatish announcements, regurgitated self-help-ish bait for people unable to find a way out of their problems, and most-of-all, a specifically formatted SEO-driven gibberish religiously written in an attempt to please the almighty Algo-lords.
To dissociate the former concept from the latter, I have retorted to using the code weblog for the former.
Weblogs are not out of existence, they are just out of fashion among the people who populate the cyberspace. The evolution of sociological nature of the cyberspace is an interesting phenomenon but maybe that's a topic for another time.
Also, by writing this entry, I do not attempt to bring weblogs in fashion all by myself. That would be a very big undertaking. I merely am a stubborn fan of the concept, who is clarifying what he's up to.
And this is what I am up to. And I hope this weblog remains to be an okay enough representation of what I have been up to all the time since today.
That's all for today!