Blogs. The Nerds' Revenge.

Blog. Yeah, I know it's a coined word that purportedly means Web Log, but I still think the term is nothing short of lame. Can you imagine what connotations such a word would have in other areas of life?

On the car lot:
"Here we are, sir. This is the Blog 5000. It's got 700 horsepower, 25 inches of wheel travel front and rear, a full roll cage, and four-wheel drive. It runs on water," the sales pitch would go.

"Yeah, but it's called the Blog. What else do you have here?"

At the doctor's office:
"I regret to tell you that you've got a terminal case of the Blogs. We've given you a 50-50 chance of living through the next six months. You'll most likely break out in a blog-like rash within a week, and the symptoms will worsen from there. Godspeed."

At the grocery store:
"I can't decide between the nasty-looking store brand, or this new cereal, Sugar-frosted Blogs. Hmmmm...store brand it is. Anything called Blogs can't be all that tasty."

All I can figure is that this is yet another case of Revenge of the Nerds. You know those tech-savvy people who used to get lampooned like crazy in the school halls of the '80's? They're running our world now and rolling in pools of cash. I'm convinced that the word Blog surfaced some time during a late-night online video game session.

"Hmmm...we've conquered the world, and I'm feeling a little hateful tonight," one of them probably said. "What revenge can we exact next?" I've got it," said another. "We'll make the general population start using some asinine word that makes them all sound like the morons we know they are. Blub? Blob? Wait, I've got it! BLOG!" And so it began. The search was on to make us all say "blog," so the powers that be have informed us that it's short for Web Log. Yeah, right.

This brings me to June 26, 2007. Off-Road Magazine has been a print magazine for four decades. Forty years! There's something timeless about printed media, even in this age of radio, TV, the Web, the iPod and the Helio. Think about it. Once you have a printed copy of Off-Road in your hand, you don't have to worry about bandwidth or batteries.

You'll be able to carry and read that copy of Off-Road anywhere on the surface of the globe, be that in your living room or hundreds of miles from the nearest cell tower. You'll still have that copy of Off-Road whether you're a current subscriber (we hope so) or a reader who puts a piecemeal magazine collection together from newsstand purchases. Print media's death has been forecast each time a new method of communicating has surfaced. The reports of the death of print media have been greatly exaggerated!

On the other hand, print media is no longer the best way to get up-to-the-minute
information. Top honors there go to the airwaves and to cyberspace. It's June, and we're just finishing putting together our October issue. The logistics of physically creating the printed pages and distributing each individual copy add up to long lead times. This means that the printed magazine's content needs to as current as possible, but that the same content should also have lasting interest and lasting value. 

If you're reading this, it means that you use the Web to find information. So do I. It's cool to be able to keep tabs on the off-road world in real time as new developments unfold on the discussion boards. If I want to know more information about a company I've read about or have heard of, I check out its website. If you've arrived here completely from an electronic origin, please check out a printed copy of Off-Road. We think you'll like it.  If you've come to our website after reading a print copy of Off-Road, thanks for visiting. Off-Road Magazine will continue in print, but we're improving our website so that www.off-roadweb.com can be a place you go to for up-to-the-minute information.

That said, I've been ordered to complete one Web Log a month, or receive a battery acid enema. Consider this the first one. Enema averted.