One of my biggest pet peeves is the misuse of the word “blog” when referring to a single post on a weblog. I was just reading A Rendezvous With Microsoft’s Deep Throat (how could you not with a title like that?) and noticed at the end of the article a header that read “For some of Mini’s most popular blogs, check out:” followed by a list of popular posts.

Unfortunately this misuse exists here at O’Reilly, as we have bloggers who submit their posts into one big system (weblogs.oreilly.com) without any sort of individual blog identity or blog name. Since the traditional notion of a blog (definition: a collection of posts composed by a single person [or cabal], ordered in reverse chronological order) doesn’t really exist, people’s posts are referred to as “weblogs” (e.g. Todd Ogasawara’s author page) which can be filtered by author or topic.

As we continue to develop and improve the O’Reilly Network, my hope is that we can organize our bloggers around subject oriented group blogs—and start referring to posts as posts.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.