What’s a Blink?

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Here’s what Donna Wentworth says in a recent post to her Copyfight weblog:

“What’s a blink? It’s a short, one-sentence blog post + a link, à la Kottke remainders… We’ll be using “blink” posts here at Copyfight to share links to articles, resources, and websites of interest that do not necessarily require paragraphs of context or analysis. Enjoy!”

Here is what I have said from the inception of FmH:

” A word about blinks, which are one of the things you’ll find Follow Me Here is full of — just as a blog is a weblog, a blink is a weblink. And, as a verb, just as we blog, we blink. Few have adopted this terminology, but it was suggested to me by a friend as I started FmH in 1999, and I’m stubbornly sticking with it.”

Early on, when it still seemed necessary to explain to people what this weblogging stuff was all about, this was on the main page of FmH. Now the link takes you to my “About FmH” page. My usage of the term was already old by 2001 when I revisited it in response to a reader’s question.

You will notice that I use ‘blink’ simply as a contraction of web+link, while Wentworth is making more of a distinction between the one-liners and the extended weblog entries. Perhaps she was not reading weblogs when almost all blinks were one-liners and weblogs were exactly that — annotated logs of one’s websurfing, so that others in your social circle could see what was interesting you. That’s what I saw when I woke up to the weblog phenomenon over the latter half of 1999, and that was the nature of the weblogs that directly inspired me — honeyguide, camworld, rebecca’s pocket, and the late lamented robot wisdom, for instance. While there were also online diaries or journals as well, the two phenomena did not converge for awhile longer. It was a long time before I dared to think readers would be receptive to any post longer than about a three-sentence paragraph.

The only notice my usage of the term ‘blink’ got was a peevish comment once on MetaFilter from someone who found it too cutesy. (I can no longer find it by searching MeFi, alas.) I couldn’t take too much umbrage at him, however, because his dig at me was in the context of trashing the fact that the word ‘weblog’ had universally been replaced by ‘blog’, a phenomenon about which I share his disdain. [I know, I know, I’m not being consistent. Maybe if ‘blink’ became overwhelmingly popular, I wouldn’t like it either. Story of my life… — FmH] And no one has even deigned to notice that I proposed using it as a verb as well.

Since to my knowledge the usage of ‘blink’ has so thoroughly failed to take hold, I wonder how in the world Bruce Umbaugh recognizes I should get the credit.