"Blog" is "Netslang" for "Web log."

I kid you not, "Blog" is "Netslang" for "Web log." is an actual sentence used on CNN right now. No where would this fly than in yet another irrelevant entry to the growing catalog of ill-fated explanatory articles on blogging.

To Blog or not to Blog it's called. Carefully staying on the path laid by so many before it. Dear Machine was Information's offer. Here I am, here's my weblog was Jyllands-Posten's.

Of course, it's also filled to the brink with falsities, demeanings, and figures grapped out of thin air. A few choice bits:

• Teenagers were the pioners: "In the early days of blogging, teenagers reigned, barfing up the days of their lives in classic teen fashion." Where do they get this from? If anything, it was the techies, who was already entrenched in all things internet, that jumped on blogging.

  Agreeably, teenagers became part of the mix when weblogs took off, but labeling them as pioneers is misleading, demeaning (the implication of irrelevance is clear), and such an easy way out.

• The .com crash made weblogs interesting:
"When the dot-coms bombed, something shifted in Blogland. Well-known journalists and other self-proclaimed experts began blogging." What is this based on? What is the implied relationship between the crash and surge in blogging, other than it happened around roughly the same time?
• There're 200-500k bloggers: "Several sources put the total number of blogs in the range of 200,000 to 500,000." Ahhh, the beloved "several sources". Journo-talk for a number pulled out of your ass.
• People blogging was the utopia all along: "This is what futurists proclaimed would happen when the Web first began." What futurists? Are we talking imaginary characters living in your head that fits a point you want to make or living human beings? In case of the latter, why hide their identity?
• Companies are k/blogging not to be left behind by individuals: "Not to be outdone, a number of corporate and mass media outlets are starting to support in-house blogs by their own journalists or as part of intranets, called k-logs or knowledge-logs." It of course couldn't be that they actually saw an economic or informational advantage in using k-log tools? Did writers in general start to use word processors "not to be outdone" by techies writing science reports?

As always, this story lacks research, sources, and, most depressingly, a good angle. There's nothing new here, let alone interesting.