Is "blogging" new?

Yes and no. Posting things online for the world to read is new, ie. the delivery system is new, but as a form, blogs are really "feuilletons."

This confirms Ad Aged's thesis that the principles of good communication haven't changed since we became Erectus, only delivery technology has.

I was introduced to the word feuilleton when I read Joseph Roth's great book, "What I Saw," about his life in Weimar Germany. He described it this way:

A feuilleton is best described by what it isn't. It isn't news. It isn't the metro report. The opposite of an editorial, a feuilleton is descriptive, philosophical, meandering and poetically inclined. Though the word is French, the form reached its apogee in fin-de-siècle Vienna. An early master, Alfred Polgar, said, ''Life is too short for literature, too transitory for lingering description . . . too psychopathic for psychology, too fictitious for novels.''