Blogroll On and On
Blog begat blogger which begat blogware, blogosphere, the bloggies, and, somewhere in the midst of all that, blogroll.
A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list).
In 2006, Six Apart launched a new product called Vox1, which promised to be blogging 2.0. It would integrate nascent social media and allow for easy posting of photos and other non-text forms of communication. I loved it.
I built a blog on Vox as soon as I could. I called it Sad Songs on a Broken Ukulele because, well, have you met me? Anyway, I very quickly built a routine around Vox. The service had a couple of features designed to get users posting everyday. Things like the Question of the Day and the Photo of the Day ran as daily prompts that were easy and fun to respond to. In short, it really was an iteration of blogging that forecast a lot of features and trends that would eventually be found on walled garden social media sites. When Vox shuttered its doors in 2010, I dutifully exported all my photos and backed up all my posts and said goodbye to the one thing every social media feed I’ve ever had has tried to replicate: a circle of friends.
Vox had a blogroll built into its framework and I could easily circle through the blogs of a half-dozen fellow writers -only some of whom I knew in real life - and then make it back to my own site, newly inspired and with my social battery recharged. In the ensuing years, as everything became about the massive numbers of followers needed to successfully monetized a blog, the blogroll got lost; it’s hard to build a circle of friends out of thousands of transient souls.
So, blogroll. Depending on how you look at it, the word is either a portmanteau or a compound noun. Either way, it’s a combination of blog and logroll, which is a kind of strange; logroll is not really anything to do with blogging. In fact, both words stem from very different uses of the word log.
Log is an old word and what do we know about old words? They collect meanings the way kids collect germs: from everywhere, all the time.
Log comes from the Old Norse term for a fallen tree sometime in the 14th century. From there it hangs about in English generally meaning fallen tree until those trees begin to be used for other things like log cabins and whatnot. After a couple hundred years and an unknown number of sailors using a piece of wood to mark speed and time, the books they recorded these observations in became known as logbooks and recording the measurements became one meaning of the verb to log. Fast forward another couple hundred years and to log is applied to the act of writing a diary on the web.
Meanwhile, back on dry land, the people of the forests were busy cutting down trees to turn into logs and thence log cabins in an act they referred to as logging. Once they were done logging for the day, they had to move all the logs somewhere, which they did by rolling. The logs. However, rolling logs isn’t really a one-person job. Help was needed. And so the art of rolling logs began to acquire a metaphorical meaning as an act of mutual assistance while simultaneously evolving into the much easier to logrolling. After all, “I’ll help you roll your logs if you help me roll mine” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
And now, to borrow a trick from Herman “Billy Budd” Melville, a digression:
I’m fascinated by the razor thin line between the back half of a compound noun, e.g. the “roll” part of blogroll, and suffixes like ~ful (as in beautiful, wonderful, etc.) ~Ful started life as the distinct and separate adverb we all know and love, full. Over time it gradually became smushed into the preceding word until it eventually formed a common suffix even while retaining the same meaning. In other words, beautiful was “full of beauty” and eventually the word order and composition shifted enough that it became a new and disparate word. It’s complicated. Anyway. I’d argue that words like roll are going through the same process only that because we’re now so much more aware of not just language change but the processes and exigencies of a global society and how they affect language growth that they will not make the same spelling changes even while they fulfill the same role. Like I said, it’s complicated, so just roll with it.
Think about it. Words like bankroll, drumroll, jellyroll, steamroll2, and, oh yeah, blogroll all use roll in the same manner, to add a connotation of circular shape or motion to the preceding word. Which is what a suffix does. Ergo…
Anyway, digressions aside, blogroll is a good word and an even better feature, which is to say, I’ve spent 800 words defining this piece of mid-aughts blogger kit just so I can call out SubStack and say, bring back the blogroll!
Not to be confused with any of the thousand-and-one other media properties called Vox…
For the record, each of these can also be spelled as separate words. In fact, whether these terms each constitute one or two words being a google-able and debatable topic kind of proves my point.