Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs.

I hate the word "blog" the way I hate most cutesy, childish terms like "cookie" that have somehow infiltrated the world of computers. At least the attempt to make us all say 'puter died the miserable death it deserved, but we're stuck with blog. It's even lost the vestigial apostrophe it sometimes used to have when 'blog was a cute adolescent bit of geeky hipness. Peter Merholz, in fact is given credit for coining 'blog' on his Petermemes personal website in the Oxford Dictionary. But that was ten years ago - back in ancient times only very uncool people remember, and when cell phones were larger and were for making phone calls, 'text' was a noun and not everyone had a weblog.

Of course without Brad Graham complaining in jest about that annoying word on his blog Bradlands back in 1999, we wouldn't have the word 'blogosphere.'

Where are we headed? Will personal publishing soon be described as being "as simple as falling off a blog"? Shall we see ultra-conservative gays start weblogs and dub themselves Blog Cabin Republicans? Track the tides with an Ebb Blog? Is blog- (or -blog) poised to become the prefix/suffix of the next century? Will we soon suffer from (and tire of) blogorreah? Despite its whimsical provenance, it's an awkward, homely little word.

Goodbye, cyberspace! Hello, blogiverse! Blogosphere? Blogmos? (Carl Sagan: "Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs.")

Graham was found dead yesterday in his St. Louis home of "natural causes." Goodbye Brad -- we'll always have blogosphere.