Plogging: Blogging on a platform such as Facebook, Slack, or Medium, rather than on a dedicated blogging site such as the one you’re visiting (hosted by TypePad). A portmanteau of platform and blogging.
From “So Long Blogging. Hello – Yep, We’re Going to Say It – Plogging,” by Julia Greenberg for Wired, October 2, 2015:
Last week, Facebook updated its little-known Notes feature to encourage users to write “more beautiful and customizable” posts separate from status updates. Medium announced a $57 million round of funding (on Medium, of course) and is holding a VIP event next week to reveal new features. Everyone’s favorite unicorn Slack relaunched its Posts feature to help users write longer at work. And Re/code reports that Twitter is building a product to allow users to share posts longer than the typical 140-character limit. …
The blog—a shortening of “weblog” is on its way out. [Punctuation sic.] Now we’re blogging on platforms. We are—yes, we’re going to say it—plogging.
This usage of plogging appears to have been invented by Julia Greenberg, who was searching for a way to describe a shift in the way people are publishing their own words online: away from standalone blogs and toward consolidated platforms that offer “a clean, simple experience, the potential for visibility where an audience already exists, and (perhaps) the kind of money that comes with scale.” Except for that “perhaps,” this sounds a lot like the pre-Internet model of freelancing for magazines. (Back then, writers expected to be paid.)
This isn’t the first attempt to re-portmanteau-ize blog. Vlog (video blog) – called vog by its inventor back in 2000 -- has been around since at least 2005, as has diavlog (dialog + video + blog). I wrote about flog, a short-lived wordmaking experiment that blended forum and blog, in 2006 – and in that very same post I noted an attempt by Amazon to make Plog (capital P) happen. Amazon filed for trademark protection for Plog – “personalized web log” – in January 2003, received a registration in October 2006, and abandoned the mark in June 2013.
But Amazon’s isn’t the only prior attempt at popularizing plog. Here’s an excerpt from an undated blog post by David Parrish, who describes his job as “helping creative entrepreneurs worldwide become even more successful”:
We’ve progressed from monologue to dialogue but now that customers are talking with each other as never before, we need a third word for it. Based on the Greek, we should call it ‘poly-logue’. It’s hard to say but could be shortened to ‘plog’. Let’s call it ‘plogging’. Yes, customers talk – and are talking like never before. Marketing has moved from monologue to dialogue to plog. Word of mouth has just gone global. Talkative customers + the internet = Plogging.
Plogging has also been used to signify:
- Professional blogging (2014)
- Property blogging (2012)
- Picture blogging (2009)
- Public blogging (2009)
- Blogging while pooping (2006)
- Python style logging for Node.js (date unknown)
See also: Platisher.
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