On Blogging: A Note From Your Dentist

Note from the Editor: Ryan has taken a blogger’s holiday leave of absence and has apparently asked his family, friends and dentist to fill in the gaps until his (preferably delayed) return. Presenting: Ryan’s Dentist.

Ryan. My son. I can surely empathize with your hatred of the word, “blog.” As can a bunch of Brits, apparently. Look at the front page of Yahoo! today, for teeth’s sake:

LONDON (AFP) – “Blog”, “netiquette”, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published Thursday.

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

“Blogosphere”, the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette”, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook”, a book based on a blog, was fifth.

“Cookie”, a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki”, a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.

British pollsters YouGov questioned 2,091 adults earlier this month for the poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for books, which released the results in a statement.

So you hate the word, fine. Look inside yourself! What is it you are hating? Hermann Hesse might have put it best in his classic ghostwriting exercise Demian:

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us” …

Blog is inside everyone who loathes it. It could be no other way. As is technorati, as is wikipedia, as is the entire expanding blogosphere. Blogosphere expands, exponentially, inside you at this time. Take heart, Ryan, and enjoy your vacation. See you in six months. You’re due a cleaning. Don’t forget to floss.