Argh. Blogging is developing into a subculture with its own argot. No, no, no, that is not what I want. This isn't high school. I don't need a clique to make me feel good. I want to take part in thoughtful conversations that leak into the public sphere.
On the other hand, Technorati.com claims to know of 994,254 weblogs (that should hit a million by next week), with 45,043,270 active links. At worst, that's a substantial sub-culture.
But, fun as terms like “Bleg,” “Blogroach,” “Fisk”, “Idiotarian,” or “Instapundit” may be, I don't think I am going to have much use for most blogging jargon. I hope to write as straightforward prose as I can, subject to the occasional need to express complex ideas and nuance, and of course to systemic sleep deprivation.
To the best of my knowledge, I have never used the terms Bleg, Blogroach, Fisk or Idiotarian. I try to use the term “Glenn Reynolds” rather than “Instapundit.”
I wouldn’t take that lexicon very seriously. There are a few terms that seem to be widely used, like “blogosphere,” but a large number of the words and phrases on that Samizdata list appear to reflect their views and agendas, not those of the weblog world in general.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it does mean their lexicon is best viewed as a work of propaganda.