How do you define a blog?

[Amelia G]

What would make you consider something a blog? I think of a blog as consisting of very short entries, all written by one person, often including material like "I ate macaroni today" and a pet photo. But I'm wondering how other people would determine whether to call something a blog. How would you define a blog? Tell me, tell me, tell me.

[keiko]

hmm a blog, or a web log to me is kind of a public journal or a one person message board. everything from my own "whether report" (yes, i spelled it like that on purpose) to the daily cute things (dailybunny.com, cuteoverload.com and stuffonmycat.com) and my theme park news sites are blogs. a message board that rather than having "threads" it has "entries" with comments. Or the NewsWire here is kind of the blog of BB, at least as i see it


hmm it is a tough thing to define.

~~K

[Bikerpunk]

It's a diary of sorts, whether it's a slick pro thing or some girl going on about the other girls in her class being bitches.

[helcyon]

hmm a blog, or a web log to me is kind of a public journal or a one person message board. everything from my own "whether report" (yes, i spelled it like that on purpose) to the daily cute things (dailybunny.com, cuteoverload.com and stuffonmycat.com) and my theme park news sites are blogs. a message board that rather than having "threads" it has "entries" with comments. Or the NewsWire here is kind of the blog of BB, at least as i see it


hmm it is a tough thing to define.

~~K

ok blogs are definitely online "diaries" and entries are sorted usually in chronological order with the most recent appearing at the top. In a blog you are usually inviting comment for your entries. Where i would expand on your definition Keiko is that blogs don't need to be a "one-person" affair... you can have shared or collaborative blogs where more than one person owns and/or administers them.

The corporate blogspace is really starting to become more prevelant and there are many internal blogs starting to show up on company intranets accessible only to employees of course and sometimes only subsets of employees. It's a buzzword and people think that they've got to be utilising them no matter what. I'm in charge of a bunch of these at my work and i must admit that I'm still figuring out why the hell we have any at all... if there is no actual need or reason for a blog (or forum) then it is probably a doomed project that will not get engagement from users and will somehow then be my fault.

Actually my engagement with these boards has been helpful on that level... so i can see what it's like from a user perspective (i never bothered with this kind of stuff before... you guys are unfortunate to have been selected to wear my comments pretty much exclusively haha). What i've discovered is that lot's of neat smilies is good . They say you should have a blog of your own if you are going to be giving advice on blogs... pity my poor users as I have never bothered having a blog and probably never will unless I start playing in bands again and we are offensive/popular enough to warrant a blog. I used to be a web developer and was proud of not having my own website. That doesn't stop me giving large amounts of expert(?) advice of course... if you are going to have a blog there's a couple of fundamentals. You need a reason (like i said), you need to update it regularly (or get someone else to... that's common), be prpared for a to spend quite a lot of time keeping it relevant and you have to understand that you may have little control over who is commenting. That's why politician's blogs are not necessarily that advantageous to them I think... their voters are from a particular area (small or large) but anyone can comment from anywhere and the poor politician has no real way of knowing if the contributer is a relevant constituent or some wag like me who doesn't even vote (naughty naughty ) and they can be forced to engage on stuff that is going to put them in a no-win situation possibly for no good reason. Yes I lose a lot of sleep worrying if politicians are ok and banks make enough money etc. etc. (no i don't).

I look after internal forums as well so I'm not always quite sure what should go on a forum and what should be a blog in some cases. Regular newsletters from the various internal departments seem to lend themselves to blogs (chronology is important). You can have announcement type forums where you don't expect (or allow) comment... maybe a bit like the two sticky threads at the top of this board. I also set up a buy and sell classifieds thingy which fitted best as a forum. It actually works so that if you subscribe to it via email you never actually need to go to it... you can just get email alerts and if you want to buy something you can interact via email as well... there's a sort of passive mode that means that not everyone needs to know that you are buying milli-vanilli tickets... the posts to the thread can be visible to just relevant parties. RSS/Atom feeds are another way of keeping up to date with blogs/forums without actually going to them that I have made available to my minions (that's a HINT Amelia I need a convenient way of keeping up with the word association thread hehe).

As far as blog software goes I crossed over to the dark side (Microsoft) quite a long time ago and I like .NET (Bill Gates pay me now) so Community Server 2007 is the bomb if you ask me.

[Donald Rilea]

I have a blog(http://afistfulofteeth.blogspot.com/, for those who are interested), and I sometimes put up personal items about my life and who I am, but I also put up political and cultural rants, odd bits of poems and stories I've written, have very recently started putting up various YouTube video clips from films and tv series I like, as well as films and tv clips that I consider to be of at least some historical interest, plus action figure, cat, demo and miscellaneous photos that I've taken.

To me, a blog can be a sort of grab-bag of items that reflects one's tastes, interests, emotions and ideas.

As for comments, the only sort of comments I truly dis-like is the kind of comment spam I used to get when I first started my blog nearly two years ago.

Have found helpful, but I hope not too unduly hard on legitimate commentators, ways of completely ridding myself of that sort of nonsense.

Bad enough getting it in one's e-mail, much less in comments to one's blog.

[VoldtaEngler]

I used to live journal random things back in the day..but dont use it anymore.

But now I am currently compiling a blog for all the hate/good mail that i get on a daily basis so I can defend myself in a way since at points tons of people seem to like to have a witchhunt when they read one shit customer review..all of their friends have to agree with them..even if they dont know who i am!
So i have to defend my name somehow.

Like my last email i received..Can you believe someone is trying to claim i am ripping off their ideas when I have proof and pictures and dated other entries from back in 2004 and beyond with designs i came up with..and their designs are obviously copies of mine and they are a new company? Ha.

[One Eyed Cat]

What would make you consider something a blog? I think of a blog as consisting of very short entries, all written by one person, often including material like "I ate macaroni today" and a pet photo. But I'm wondering how other people would determine whether to call something a blog. How would you define a blog? Tell me, tell me, tell me.

I guess most are. I think of political blogs. not usually written by one person, and not containing that though. It's a software format you can do anything with really. The term "blog" has no real meaning. I guess you could say a website-logged by date-for whatever purpose? I used blog software for OR and disabled all comments.

Jackie T

[Donald Rilea]

It does seem as though what a blog is, and what features it has, have become about as flexible in meaning as a Cirque Du Soleil gymnast's spine over the past few years.

Guess this was bound to happen as the number of people actually having them increased in size and diversity, though, from what little I've read on-line recently, it seems that the American political blogosphere is still primarily a white male dominated one.

Go figure.

[One Eyed Cat]

It does seem as though what a blog is, and what features it has, have become about as flexible in meaning as a Cirque Du Soleil gymnast's spine over the past few years.

Guess this was bound to happen as the number of people actually having them increased in size and diversity, though, from what little I've read on-line recently, it seems that the American political blogosphere is still primarily a white male dominated one.

Go figure.

"Conservatives" got a real jump on the rest when the blogosphere first started getting big. I can think of some major female and minority bloggers, they are all conservative though. I don't say that as a complaint, they tended to be my allies when it came to some issues in Eastern Europe. I started in '04. May spark it up again in a few months.

Jackie T

http://michellemalkin.com/2005/12/18...-lame-choices/
The Orange Girl with the cat is my blog/site/whatever

[helcyon]

http://michellemalkin.com/2005/12/18...-lame-choices/
The Orange Girl with the cat is my blog/site/whatever

nice one... another funny looking cat too!!

[Buster Friendly]

is a "blog" anythng like a "blump"?

...sorry, i've always thought it sounded slightly scatalogical.

"podcasting" too... isn't that what's leftover when a bodysnatcher pod person hatches, and leaves behind the 'casting' or used pod?

[One Eyed Cat]

nice one... another funny looking cat too!!

haha yeah. I wish I still had the link from this Argentinian Fascist group bashing the pic. They called her something foul in spanish. I would have posted that one.

Jackie T

[Donald Rilea]

Argie fascists pickin' on your kitty??? Disgusting.

People can say whatever they like about me, but leave my cats out of it.

But, hey, some bozos always, always, go for what they see as the weakest target.

By the way, the term "bozos" is perhaps too polite a term for dim-bulbs who'd go after the picture of a cat.

[One Eyed Cat]

Argie fascists pickin' on your kitty??? Disgusting.

People can say whatever they like about me, but leave my cats out of it.

But, hey, some bozos always, always, go for what they see as the weakest target.

By the way, the term "bozos" is perhaps too polite a term for dim-bulbs who'd go after the picture of a cat.

They went after the little girl in orange holding the cat. It was pretty odd. They seemed to like Yulia Tymoshenko. She was a major part of the Orange Revolution. Their assumptions about her were amusing. I think they were picturing Eva Peron. But yeah; the site got bashed from an odd assortment of fascists, old school communists, and conspiracy theorists who seemed to believe the CIA had half of Ukraine on speed dial. It was pretty funny actually. I hope to always have "enemies" like that.

Jackie T

[Donald Rilea]

Either way, pretty disgusting, whether little girl or feline.

Personally, am rather a leftist sort myself, and tend to be very sceptical of Western aims in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Still, hope I would never go after someone who didn't deserve, through their words and actions, to be gone after.

Come at me, if one likes, but kindly don't go after my family or cats.

They aren't responsible for the jerk-ass things I say or do, only I am.

Interesting note about the Argentine fascists' regard for Tymoshenko.

Funny thing is that, for much of the Argentine non-Peronist right, Eva Peron is a hate figure, so I find it fascinating that any Argentine fascists might have any regard for her, or anyone they perceive to be like her.

As Mr. Spock would say, "Fascinating."

[One Eyed Cat]

Either way, pretty disgusting, whether little girl or feline.

Personally, am rather a leftist sort myself, and tend to be very sceptical of Western aims in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Still, hope I would never go after someone who didn't deserve, through their words and actions, to be gone after.

Come at me, if one likes, but kindly don't go after my family or cats.

They aren't responsible for the jerk-ass things I say or do, only I am.

Interesting note about the Argentine fascists' regard for Tymoshenko.

Funny thing is that, for much of the Argentine non-Peronist right, Eva Peron is a hate figure, so I find it fascinating that any Argentine fascists might have any regard for her, or anyone they perceive to be like her.

As Mr. Spock would say, "Fascinating."

I believe the west's intentions and actions in the former Yugoslavia have been outright criminal. I believe Clinton should have been impeached the second a bomb landed in Serbia. We destroyed the infrastructure of a nation, killed 3000 people (99% civilians), and polluted the Danube with our depleted uranium munitions. In terms of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as a whole, I don't completely embrace anti-interventionism these days due to one factor: RUSSIA. I believe Russia to be even more odious than Madeline Halfbright and her minions of "fight for peace" armchair warriors. This encompasses most of what passes for the "left" and "right" in this country.

The Orange Revolution wasn't about us.

I don't know where my "friends" from Argentina would fit along a left-right axis. They made it clear, however, that they envisioned Yulia becoming some sort of "benign" dictator.

Jackie T