MILT THOMAS

I would like to say a few words about blogs. First of all, the internet has spawned an entire dictionary worth of new terms designed to make it more user friendly, but more often it confuses us – mother board, android, hotlink, hard drive,  byte, cursor, defrag, download, SCSI (pronounced “scuzzie”), worm, and that term we are all familiar with, crash. These terms are mostly misspelled versions of familiar, if not often vulgar, words. Like what does scuzzie mean to you? And download seems uncomfortably close to a street reference often used by Howard Stern.

Back to blogs. That funny sounding relatively new word is a staple of the blogosphere. Oh, and that refers to all the blogs now on the Internet. The fact it is a ‘sphere’ like ‘atmosphere,’ should indicate just how popular a concept it has become. Blog can actually be used as a noun or a verb.

Now, for the two or three of you not familiar with the term blog, it is not a misprinted title of a 1950s horror movie starring Steve McQueen. If someone has multiple blogs, it is not a form of depression, like the Monday morning blogs.

It is a contraction of the term “web log,” you know, like a diary or lab notes that are put up on the web. Oh, and the WWW (Worldwide Web) is nothing to do with an international conspiracy of spiders.

There are actually tens of millions of blogs in this country and close to 200 million worldwide. They range in scope from personal blogs that no one reads except the writer, or family, or close friends. There are social networking blogs where you can talk about people not on your network, microblogs, of which the most popular is called Twitter. And yes, even news blogs.

Maybe you are familiar with CNN, Forbes, UPS, eBay, the GOP and Jay-Z. Well, maybe you are not familiar with Jay-Z. He’s a former street hustler who has become an accomplished businessman, music icon and husband of Beyonce. By the way, all of those companies use the same blog provider, WordPress, that we use for Inside Vero.

But blog is probably the most misinterpreted term. I say that because recently InsideVero was accused by someone on another radio talk show as being a blog and not a real news source. That’s like saying Steinway is not a real piano because it doesn’t use electricity.

At InsideVero we publish the latest news about what is really happening in Vero Beach government and also publish commentary. We actually label our commentary as such and don’t pass it off as news. Furthermore, even our commentary is well researched so it would never pass off as baloney.

Blogs are usually interactive, meaning you can add your two cents to anything written on them. At InsideVero, we also invite readers to comment on our topics as long as the comments are adult-like and civilized.

So folks, to anyone who reads our online news magazine and still thinks it isn’t real news, as Mr. Spock would say, “That’s not blogical.”