Celebrating 14 years of blogging

My first blog post fourteen years ago was about Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake.  This was the only quote from the book that I included:

Apart from his father, the baby has three visitors, all Bengali . . . Maya and Dilip give the boy a rattle and a baby book, with places for his parents to commemorate every possible aspect of his infancy. . . . Dr. Gupta gives the boy a handsome illustrated copy of Mother Goose rhymes.  "Lucky boy," Ashoke remarks, turning the beautifully sewn pages.  "Only hours old and already the owner of books" (page 24).

And thus my book blog was born.  I asked seven questions at the end of that first post and included my own answers in the comments.  A few of my bookish friends, most of them from our years together discussing Oprah's book club selections, came to welcome me to the blogging world.  Still, half of the comments were from me, answering my book-related questions about names and ancestry.  It took me three weeks to get them all answered.  Only then did I finally post another two times in February.  Yes, I got off to a very SLOW start. 

Many of my earlier book blogger friends have moved on to other interests and no longer blog.  Anyway, today I celebrate what bloggers call a "blogiversary."

Words of the Day

blog / bläɡ / noun = a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style; used as a verb, it means to add new material to or regularly update a blog.  Example:  "It's been a week since I last blogged."  And a blogiversary is the anniversary of someone's weblog (blog).

The term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997.  The short form, blog, was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.