As this is a nautical blog, I do feel compelled to at least tip our hat to Andrew Sullivan’s recent article “Why I Blog“, in this month’s Atlantic Monthly .   (I do recommend Sullivan’s political blog for the Atlantic – The Daily Dish.)

I feel the need to recognize Sullivan because he labors manfully to use a nautical metaphor, the ship’s log, to explain the process of “blogging”.   As he notes “the word blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log.”  He goes on to say:

“A ship’s log owes its name to a small wooden board, often weighted with lead, that was for centuries attached to a line and thrown over the stern. The weight of the log would keep it in the same place in the water, like a provisional anchor, while the ship moved away. By measuring the length of line used up in a set period of time, mariners could calculate the speed of their journey (the rope itself was marked by equidistant “knots” for easy measurement). As a ship’s voyage progressed, the course came to be marked down in a book that was called a log. ”

He gets it almost right.  For the sticklers, William Falconer’s 1780 “UNIVERSAL DICTIONARY OF THE MARINE: OR, A COPIOUS EXPLANATION OF THE TECHNICAL TERMS and PHRASES EMPLOYED IN THE CONSTRUCTION, EQUIPMENT, FURNITURE, MACHINERY, MOVEMENTS, AND MILITARY OPERATIONS OF A SHIP” [Note: They just don’t write titles like they used to] has a short but detailed entry on a ship’s log.

Sullivan then extends the metaphor to the ship’s log book, which indeed is usually referred to simply as the “log”.

“In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened. They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. They provided accountability to a ship’s owners and traders. They were designed to be as immune to faking as possible. Away from land, there was usually no reliable corroboration of events apart from the crew’s own account in the middle of an expanse of blue and gray and green; and in long journeys, memories always blur and facts disperse. A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time. ”

He then gets a bit tangled up in the log line itself.

“As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book.”

That is certainly true if you are referring to a ship’s streaming log but not so if you mean the log book which is organized as a book, chronologically from beginning to end.  Web blogging, of course, does run backwards, though can be instantly organized by categories, tages, pages or dates with the click of a mouse. 

He continues with the metaphor intermittently; “A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit” before moving on to the predict a new golden age of journalism:

“In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane. ” 

One can only hope that he is right. Until then we can all just keep heaving our logs, or blogs, into the virtual sea and hope for the best.