Hey that's a tough question!
I would say that the term blog is used to cover a variety of different phenomena on the web that all bear some family resemblances to each other but not necessarily share the exact same characteristics.
There are roughly 3 genres in the blogosphere:
1. The personal blog. Take something like girlwithaonetrackmind where a person exposes everything about her self and sexlife in the form of a diary or even confessions.
2. Then there is the political blog - in the US you have The Daily Kos on one side and littlegreenfootballs on the other side of the sprectrum who functions as commentary and critique of political questions and the media and almost always from a particular viewpoint.
3. Finally we have the professional blog where an individual posts about his or her area of expertise or interest. The personal development blogosphere is a subgenre of this genre.
So, the subject matter of a blog can be practical anythng, and the same can of course be said about a website. But the blog is also a website so we have to look at the technical characteristics to distinguish a blog from other forms on the web.
1. You can of course build your own blog but the vast majority of them are based on the numerous software solutions that are already in place like blogger or wordpress. The blog gave the layman an opportunity to publish to the web. It is therefore part of the web 2.0. cluster of software - together with youtube, myspace or flickr. Before the blog it was both technically difficult and tiresome to build and modify - for example post every day - a website.
2. The word blog or weblog is derived from the concept of a ship's logbook. It is a book the captain updates on a daily basis concerning location and route and so on. Similarly the blog is based on frequent updates where the last entry is based at the top.
3. Finally the blogroll, something that almost all blogs have is a list of sites - the majority of them are other blogs - the author reads, recommends or otherwise endorses. The political blogger, for example, will have a collection of the people who agree with his view. Which isn't always a good thing in politics...
Any ideas? What else can be said about blogs?  |