I am continually horrified at the junk which shows up when you search for perl blog on Google. The first use.perl.org journal is 14 links down. perlbuzz isn't even on the page.
Perl blogs does much better, some SEO has been done on that by Andy and Skud and the Planet Perl folks -- honestly Google should figure out the blog/blogs singular/plural thing -- but again use.perl.org is #7 below hotscripts.com! The only reason it's on the list at all is because Skud happened to mention the word "blog" in a post.
Whether you prefer the term "journal" or "blog" or just don't care, you can have no effect on the world if they can't find you. People search for "blog", not "journal", that's simply how the vocabulary has swung. By refusing to acknowledge that, by not having the word blog anywhere on use.perl.org, not even in the otherwise unseen meta, is not a stand against what some people perceive to be stupid Internet lingo, but a self inflicted gag. If people can't find you, people can't find out what you're saying. We have rendered ourselves irrelevant to anyone not in the know.
People say "Perl is dead" because, to an outsider, they don't see anything going on. And instead of putting ourselves where people are looking, we think we can change where they look. The reality is if nobody is watching us we can have no influence over anyone but ourselves.
This is a blog. It is also a diary, a journal, a record and an account. It is not somehow harmful to use these synonyms, it is useful to draw more people in because different people think differently. The content and community of use.perl is strong enough to weather the addition of a synonym.
In order to route around this, I will simply start using the word "blog" in my "journal" and see if Google notices. I encourage others to do the same. And I hope it will start appearing in the site's meta information where it can hurt no one and only help our journals be found and read.
I am completely content with it staying as obscure as it is. Something less dusty and hard to use should show up in Google when people go looking for Perl.
