Web Words Of the Day

Out of curiosity, I checked to see when various Internet phrases caught on by searching the LexisNexis news archive, which includes more than a thousand newspapers, magazines, newsletters and TV show transcripts.

"Instant messaging" and its abbreviation, IM, seemed to take five or six years to go mainstream, judging by how frequently "instant message" or "instant messaging" appeared in articles stored in the Lexis archive. They had dozens of mentions in 1994 and 1995, but neither merited 1,000 annual mentions in Lexis until 1999.

Blog took only about three years to go mainstream. "Web log" was shortened to "blog" about six years ago, yielding a catchy word for the outpouring of personal writing at Web sites functioning as virtual private printing presses. In 2000, "blog" merited 52 mentions in Lexis, some unrelated to the Web. The word popped up in mainstream media in 2001, when it appeared 190 times in news articles. That jumped to 940 references in 2002 and 4,742 in 2003. No wonder Merriam-Webster Inc. declared blog "word of the year" in 2004, when it was the single most looked-up term at the dictionary publisher's site.

Podcast -- an amalgamation of iPod and broadcast referring to audio files people post online for downloading and playing on iPods -- leapt into our lexicon even faster. The terms "podcast" and "podcasting" showed no mentions in Lexis for 2003, appeared 80 times in 2004 and then got hammered into the public consciousness with 8,859 media references last year.

Next came "vlog," a contraction of video and blog coined to describe the homemade videos people started posting on their blogs. It crept into mainstream media last year with 219 mentions in Lexis. Based on its usage in recent months, I expect it will rate more than 1,000 news references this year.

Now blogs, podcasts and vlogs are expanding into unfamiliar terrain as people combine them with other Internet tools and explore novel ways to share the resulting material. Once again we are struggling for language to describe the new things people are doing online. Words fail us as we try to tell pals about the material we just edited at the open encyclopedia Wikipedia, the thoughts we posted about a stranger's home video at video-sharing site YouTube, the ratings we gave news stories at Digg, or the music annotations we shared at TagWorld.

That's where "Web 2.0" beckons. Pundits are seizing on it as a convenient term to describe everything happening online, especially new social behaviors involving user participating and sharing. But even if the Web needed an umbrella phrase, how long would the 2.0 moniker serve a useful purpose?

I have no doubt young people are already using their so-called 2.0 Web tools to fashion 3.0 and 4.0 versions, which will emerge any day now from dorm rooms and garages everywhere.

By any word, that's the way of the Web.

Leslie Walker welcomes e-mail atwalkerl@washpost.com.