A new way to define "blog"
Everywhere I turn, it seems someone is asking me what the definition of "blog" is. Is it any old website? Is it just chronologically-organized content? Can an organization blog, or is it necessarily individual? If there are no public comments, is it a blog? What if you're using blog technology to do non-bloggy things - is it a blog anyway? Are blogs journalism?
Henry Copeland, the brilliant guy behind BlogAds, has another answer: A blog is a conversation.
Blogs are very much about personal expression. Bloggers have a genetic advantage over traditional publishers. Blogging is in our social DNA, just like conversing, except blog conversations are amplified by the Internet to reach around the globe and entwine with thousands of similar conversations. Basically the blogosphere is a big cocktail party. A blogger may dish out an anecdote about what her son ate for breakfast, an endorsement of a candidate, a curse word or a prayer and a movie review. In that mix are bound to be comments that offend one constituency or another. That's human.
Sounds about right to me.
And given that all politics is personal, every politician should be engaged in the conversation with their constituents, their supporters, their critics, and with the public. Someday, having a blog will be as obvious as having a phone number.
Kari Chisholm | July 30, 2005 | Comments (10) |
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Comments
Conversation is indeed a valuable outcome of the best blogs. But I have to take issue with the idea that a blog necessarily IS a conversation. A blog is a Web log. And a log, according to Merriam-Webster Online (m-w.com), is "a record of performance, events or day-to-day activities." Or, if we'd rather use a more Web-savvy, democratic (small "d") source, we can go to Wikipedia and learn that a blog (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog) is "a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order)." In fact, I recently set up a blog for a political client who decided, against my recommendation, to remove the comment feature, citing Talking Points Memo (talkingpointsmemo.com) as an example. As much as I hated to make that alteration -- and as much as I think the blog, the client and readers will be the worse for it -- I have to admit it's still very much a blog. I agree with a lot of what Henry Copeland likes about a lot of blogs. But -- although you might think I'm overreacting for feeling this way -- there's something that strikes me as creepily Newspeakish about telling me that a word with a generally accepted definition actually means something else because that's what you WANT it to mean. It's like we're trying to erase the commentless blogs from existence. Just like in "1984": If there's no word for it, then people can't think it. Maybe what we really need is some terminology to distinguish the kind of blogging we want to discourage from the kind we want to discourage.
Posted by: Chris Williamson | Jul 30, 2005 4:26:15 PM
... from the kind we want to ENCOURAGE, I mean. Oops. =)
Posted by: Chris Williamson | Jul 30, 2005 4:37:39 PM
Chris.... on the one hand, you're right. A blog is a piece of technology. And comments or no, if you're using a blog software system, you're probably blogging.
But, what I'm trying to do is encourage best practices by creating the right mind set. If you think blog=conversation, then you're on the right track.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Jul 31, 2005 11:13:53 PM
...and btw, I think it's important to point out that you don't have to have comments enabled in order to have a conversation. Sure, it'll be more limited, but I am (and I believe Henry is) talking about 'conversation' in a broader sense - to mean a particular tone of voice, timeliness of content, and continuity of thought.
Comments enabled is VERY important, but not a necessary element.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Jul 31, 2005 11:16:08 PM
I actually just read the term 'flog' - for fake blog - used today to define a blog that didn't allow comments.
It was on a blog discussing the intersection of traditional PR with blogging practices, ironically enough...I'll try to find the reference.
Posted by: Betsy | Aug 1, 2005 11:05:13 PM
Of course, maybe a 'flog' is more along these lines.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Aug 1, 2005 11:12:16 PM
One question about comments:
Are they appropriate on a campaign website? Comments are great for building community, but isn't the purpose of a campaign to get out a message, and doesn't the presence of commenters who critique that message make it more difficult to effectively communicate that message?
Or maybe they just add to the interest in the message and promote it even more. Sort of the idea that there's no such thing as bad press. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, Kari, having done multiple campaign websites.
Posted by: Christopher Nicholson | Aug 4, 2005 1:24:42 AM
If I were to define blog then I would have said that "Blog is a plateform wehre one can share ideas and at the same time learns something new." :)
Posted by: Samules | Oct 29, 2005 3:21:02 AM
I too am still searching for the answer to that question.... "what is a blog?"
seems that the media has hijacked that term "blog"
they refer to "bloggers" in a way that over generalizes a population
they are talking about bloggers who are more like journalists blogging about politics
well....
that would be as fair as talking about bicycle messengers but simply using the term cyclists
what about all the other cyclists that this generalization does not apply to?
always bringing it back to the bike
Posted by: gwadzilla | Feb 25, 2006 10:44:54 AM
Well in my opinion a blog is a platform where
one can have conversation, share ideas and always learn something new.
Posted by: Martin | Apr 13, 2006 10:46:09 AM
