I coined a new word

I coined a new word today (with help from Meg and David): “metatorial”. Derived from the words “meta” and “editorial”, metatorial is commentary about commentary. For example, much of the content on kottke.org and most other weblogs is metatorial in nature; people are commenting on other people’s comments. Update: forgot to add that metatorial is not really a new word…it’s an old word with a new definition.

The metatorial aspect of weblogs is just one of the things that makes a weblog a “new form of communication/publishing”; Peterme wrote about the immediacy aspect yesterday:

“It’s simply about putting form to thought and getting it out there. The omnipresence of the internet allows for the publishing of thought pretty much *as it occurs*. This is new. This is exciting. People all over the world, going about their business, have something occur to them. In moments they can simply *put it out there*. Whatever ‘it’ is. This is a notion that seems obvious when you look at it, but I don’t think the blogging phenomenon has ever been discussed in this way.”

A similar take on weblogs by Chris Locke in a Publish article called Micromedia:

“At first glance, weblogs don’t seem like anything new. Anyone with a text editor, an FTP client and a Web page could put one together. But how much effort is too much? The requirement to write HTML would probably exclude most people right off the bat. Remember when e-mailed URLs had to be cut and pasted into a Web browser? After it became possible to click directly on these links, the Web took a huge leap forward. Sometimes small changes can have unexpectedly large results. Weblogging appears to be one such small wrinkle in the Web today.”

OK, I think that’s enough about weblogs for one day.