Word of the Week: Diavlog

Diavlog: A video blog, or vlog, in which two people discuss a topic. A portmanteau of dialog, video, and blog. (Blog is itself a truncated portmanteau of web and log.)

Diavlog was coined popularized by Bloggingheads.tv, which was founded by journalists Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus in November 2005. Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer took note of the coinage in a March 1, 2006, post to the American Dialect Society listserv that included a citation from the Bloggingheads website (note: the Bloggingheads link no longer appears to be active):

After announcing near the outset of this video that in it Mickey and I were experimenting with a format "we call the diavlog" I got around to actually googling "diavlog" and got two hits. One was actually for "dia-vlog" (hyphenated)--a kind of interactive video-editing game that has something in common with our `diavlog' but is a very different kind of thing. (Seems cool, btw.) The other hit led to a discussion in which someone threw out "diavlog" as one of several possible names for some new conversational video genre that was only vaguely described and that, so far as I could tell, hasn't been realized--and that, in any event, seems not to have taken up "diavlog" as its name. I guess we could spell it "diavlogue" and be completely original.

Zimmer added:

The phonotactics of [-vl-] are a bit tricky in English, as I think Mickey Kaus unwittingly illustrated via this metathetical typo in a recent column:

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http://www.slate.com/id/2136998

In the "diavolg" about Coulter I declare that Bob's recent NYT op-ed
(the one Coulter was discussing) makes "one very good point" but "went
astray in a couple of places."
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Ben Zimmer and his brother, science writer Carl Zimmer, participated in a Bloggingheads diavlog last weekend. The topic was words; the brothers Zimmer took on "the ever-changing number of Eskimo words for snow," the myth of Walter Cronkite's influence on the Swedish language, "the endlessly adaptable FAIL!" and other topics.

Aside: Does anyone besides me perceive something a little diabolical about the look of diavlog?