If you are interested in language usage, this is a weblog written by a number of linguists, mostly talking among themselves.

I am not familiar with any of the contributors except Geoff Nunberg, the linguistic commentator on NPR’s Fresh Air, from whose on-air column today about weblogging I learned about LanguageLog. Nunberg mentions that he is new to weblogging (which he persists, unquestioningly and annoyingly, in calling “blogging”) and can’t get the tone right; unlike his NPR commentaries, his weblog entries sound pedantic to him. He thinks his problem is that he tries to be reportorial but, lo and behold, he realizes, weblogging isn’t exactly like journalism! It is clear that he is new to “blogging”, since he still struggles with exactly what it is and what tone he should adopt, unlike most of us who have long since given up that struggle. Nunberg also completely misses the historical boat, getting caught up in a debate about which luminary’s claim that their print column — Mickey Kaus, Camille Paglia, or even Herb Caen — was the first “blog” is correct. This obfuscation of the differences between a ‘column’ and a weblog undoes some of his earlier struggles in the commentary to define exactly what is distinctive about a weblog. He is too caught up, as one might expect of a linguist rather than a more broadly-based media commentator, on ‘tone’ and word choice to notice that the weblogging medium is as much or more defined by temporal dimensions such as immediacy and transiency or my favorite parameter, ‘granularity’. Nunberg also commits the cardinal sin of invoking the ‘blogosphere’ concept, by the way.

All that about Nunberg is a tangent; there is much stimulating linking, observing and commenting at LanguageLog.