Bibliobloggers

I've been enjoying following all the different suggestions for renaming the collective term for the increasing number of those blogging on academic Biblical studies. Ed Cook in Ralph the Sacred River, for example, suggests Bibliablogger and Stephen Carlson in Hypotyposeis thinks that that might work. Eric Sowell, The Coding Humanist, has a useful summary post. Well, I am going to stand out from the pack and be boring and conservative and state my preference for the existing term biblioblogger. It's already in use and has been for some time; googling for "bibliobloggers" (etc.) does bring us all up; it's much easier to say than the alternative bibliablogger, which people will misspell anyway; the other alternatives all have major drawbacks; and I rather like the way that the term biblioblogger just evolved and dropped into everyday blogging usage. A term that evolves and gets used in such a way is always more likely to stick around than one that is artificially created. The fact that no one can remember who first used the term biblioblogger is itself a hint that the term we have got is in some way natural and easily usable. (I think it was David Meadows in Rogueclassicism who first used it, but I can't find the origin of it in his blog if so). The only disadvantage, it seems to me, is the possible confusion with blogs about bibliography or books, and I doubt that that confusion is a problem in the contexts in which we use the term biblioblogger, so I don't think that there is any need to be concerned about that.

Update (11.10): David Meadows emails to say that the earliest reference he can find to this is on RogueClassicism on 27 January 2004. Like me, he does not see the problem with the term -- "there are piles of blog titles which evoke various things which have nothing to do with what an academic scholar in the field might immediately thing of (e.g. Tacitus has nothing to do with Tacitus, etc.)".