Blog: (n.)(v.) (A truncation of weblog) A website on which an individual or group of users produce an ongoing regular narrative, displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears at the top, often written in an informal or conversational style.

A blog’s entomology

This inelegant word is derived from Weblog, or should that be we-blog (see the previous paragraph). Blog, its ugly orphan, created by the unholy conjoining of the word log, pertaining to a formal account, to the orphaned B from the word Web, thus ‘Web-Log’ becomes ‘Blog’. Coined by programmer Peter Merholz, incredibly in 2004 the American dictionary-publishing firm Merriam-Webster proclaimed it ‘Word of the Year’.

If it had been invented today, it would have been described as: ‘record on the cloud’ – or reloud.

A blog’s purpose

I’m well aware that most blogs – with, of course, the exception of CabbieBlog – are egocentric areas where tragic people waffle on and on with their dull scribblings because they genuinely believe the reader is interested in their extremist political views, uninspired recipes or some dull apparel they are wearing. This is usually because the author believes that the person who reads ‘his/her blog’ actually wants to find out more about them, when in fact the vast majority of viewers have just stumbled into their corner of cyberspace looking for cute kittens or young ladies showing parts of their anatomy.

A blog’s timeline

When is the optimum time or day to post? For getting backlinks for your blog posts, the study by Kissmetrics suggests that Monday and Thursday are the best days. It further went on to reveal that publishing early morning on these two days around 7 am will increase your chances of getting the most inbound links.

The more observant reader will have noticed that CabbieBlog posts long-form pieces on Tuesday and Friday at 1.50 pm, close to those time-slots, but not those optimum time slots.

A blog’s length

In the last five years, the average time for writing a post has steadily grown from 2:24 hours to 3:28 hours. The blog post length for the same period rose accordingly, from 808 to 1,151 words on average.

There are roughly 1.9 billion web pages at this moment making one trillion, nine hundred billion words out there to be read. With 2 million posts uploaded daily, we will be hitting 2 billion posts in less than a year. Who knows, this post could be the one to hit that milestone, also adding an additional 425 words.