I remember, back in the late '90s, seeing my friend Miles' "weblog." It was a collection of lightly-annotated links to odds and ends around the web that he had found interesting – in other words, it was literally his log of the web.

At that time, before Google and Facebook and Twitter, before endless online publications curating and aggregating, it seemed an invaluable resource, a way to find the fun and interesting and new that I'd otherwise have completely missed. After Miles', I sought out a handful of other interesting weblogs, and returned to them regularly over the weeks and months that followed.

In the two decades since, 'weblog' was elided to 'blog,' and mashed up with the sort of online journaling that appeared in Livejournal, to produce platforms like Blogger and MovableType, the progenitors of what we now think of as blogging. This site, indeed, is closer to the now-used meaning: as Wikipedia puts it, "a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts"), typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page."

But, for the first decade of this site, I also kept a second, mini-blog in the right sidebar, one which hewed closer to the original meaning of the term. It was simply a collection of what I was watching, reading, enjoying, or pondering elsewhere on the web, linked directly with a bit of description or commentary.

I called that side-blog Salmagundi, an English word that stems from the French 'salmigondis', and means "a disparate assembly of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent whole."

Five years ago, with Twitter growing fast (and still, at that time, only about a tenth the size that it is today), I decided to shift platforms, to ditch Salmagundi in favor of simply tweeting that kind of content instead.

And, indeed, though I've been intermittent at best in my tweets, I quickly picked up a (perhaps undeservedly) sizable audience there.

But, in the more recent past, as I've continued to follow a handful of old-style weblogs (like the great sidebar at Waxy.org), I've also started to think about the differences between Tweeting and side-blogging.

Tweets are hugely ephemeral; I almost never read back through individual users' profiles, so if I don't happen to see something when it floats down my Twitter stream, it's gone for good. Whereas, with a link-blog, even if I haven't been to the site for several weeks, I still find myself scrolling through everything that's been posted in the intervening time. Those weblogs feel to me more like, well, logs, archival indices that point to the enduringly interesting and good. They still feel, at least to me, like they’re worthwhile, even in our Twitter-ified world.

So, as of today, I’m relaunching Salmagundi over on the right-hand side of this site. The look and feel may continue to evolve a bit, and I apologize in advance if the update has broken anything for you – it turns out my PHP and CSS coding skills didn’t somehow improve on their own after a decade-and-a-half of disuse. Hopefully, you’ll find at least some of what I post as intriguing as I do. (And, if not, the site’s free; you get what you pay for.)