Peter Merholz Turned Weblog Into Blog by Moving One Syllable in His Sidebar

Peter Merholz moved the break in a word one letter to the left, put the result in a sidebar, and helped rename a medium. Some of us spend longer choosing a Wi-Fi name.

In his 2002 recollection, Merholz dates the change to April or May 1999. He doesn’t pretend to remember which. His suggested pronunciation was “wee’- blog,” shortened to blog. It was casual wordplay on weblog, with a bonus: split the syllables that way and you can hear somebody describing an activity.

Merholz started using the term in posts, saw it in messages from other people, and later credited the August 1999 arrival of Pyra Labs’ Blogger with helping it survive. The sidebar didn’t have to persuade every future publisher. A tool could keep putting the word in front of people while giving them something to do with it.

His own explanation was refreshingly ungrand: “I was just being silly.” No naming consultancy, no unveiling, no slideshow about the emotional resonance of four letters. I’d like that line printed on the invoice for the next six-month corporate rebrand.

Weblog already had a life before that pun. Jorn Barger marked the anniversary on his own site, dating his Robot Wisdom WebLog to December 17, 1997. That establishes the name’s earlier milestone without requiring us to declare the web’s first blogger, a title I’d rather leave off the business card.

Barger’s 2007 advice, published in his own words, described weblogs as a way to save and share links, with the author’s interests determining what deserved attention. One useful instruction was to describe a link clearly enough that readers could tell whether they had visited it already. Even the internet’s old vocabulary came with a cure for accidental repeat clicks.

I’d happily borrow that approach for a small personal site. The page can say what I found and why I liked it, then send people directly to the person who made it. My contribution would be the selection and the useful description. I wouldn’t need to inflate a worthwhile link into eight paragraphs before allowing anybody to click it.

And I’d keep Merholz’s uncertain month intact when telling this story. An origin account is more interesting when its author admits the blur. Turning April-or-May into a confident day on a timeline makes the story look cleaner while leaving it less accurate.

My money says tools will keep having more influence on our vocabulary than naming committees want to admit. A label attached to something people actually enjoy doing gets repeated for free. A sidebar joke had that advantage before anybody gave it a marketing budget.

Merholz couldn’t pin down the month. The typo-free joke kept traveling.