Xeni Jardin posts at Boing Boing that the old-fashioned paper blog is a "handwritten journal attributed to a woman who lived in Boston in 1878. It's filled with talk of star quilts, boiling sheets, chamber pots, bed tick, collar boxes, ginger cakes, feather pillows, corsets, stabbings and head wounds. Our ancestors called these things 'DIE-ah-rees.'"

Also at Boing Boing: Blog is the number-one lookup word for 2004 at Merriam-Webster Online. Unless it's just a clever viral marketing campaign by the folks at Merriam...