A newspaper is a collection of factual events. Only a Liberal would define a newspaper as a collection of opinions.

OT: Your gravatar sign up code doesn’t seem to work.

There are articles that make you nod your head all the time you’d fear getting stiff neck. I just read and reread one an hour ago. It’s by Bob Cauthorn and it discusses blogging by mainstream media. The article sums up, in an acerbic tone, how mos…

pinoy muna bago blog…

That’s the reason why it’s pretty hard to define what is a blog and what isn’t.

For our own purposes, I think we have to define a *pinoyblog* (not just “blog”) as a blog which has *all* the following characteristics:

1. It has the technical characteristics mentioned in the definition of the term “blog” in the Wikipedia.
2. It is authored by a Pinoy individual or members of a Pinoy community.
3. It is *not* a corporate blog.
4. ( Add more criteria here… )

Then we go further and declare that only *pinoyblogs* (not just any blog) are allowed in the Pinoy Top Blogs. (And maybe rename it to “Top Pinoy Blogs”).

When I started Pinoy Top Blogs, I had the individual Pinoy Bloggers interest in mind. With PinoyBlog.com, we were successful in making the pinoy bloggers’ presence felt. With Pinoy Top Blogs, I hope we can make our numbers matter and our cummulative traffic something to reckon with.

If we concede on a technicality, almost every site there can be, in the minutest sense, considered a blog.

Thus, I’d like to return back to my original intent and exclude those that does not seem to fit with the goals of this project.

I have started off by removing Pinoyblog from the Community/Group blog category.

OT: counted ba yung mga Friendster blogs? hehe jk

Authors meaning, does the content of the blog have to be written by the blog authors/publishers? What if it accepts contributions from the general public, should it be categorized differently?

And, yes, this thread was borne out of a controversy in “Pinoy Top Blogs”. Yuga said so in the entry.

A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”.

John C. Dvorak’s primer on blogging also describes a publishing format http://www.dvorak.org/blog/primer/blogprimer1.htm

In answering the question “What is a blog?”, I suggest we take it at the same level as answering “What is a Wiki?” and not “What is good music?.” In short, let us do away with subjective definitions such as content but definitions that immediately help differentiate a blog from, say, a website. What definitions differentiate a blog from a wiki?

In my opinion, what differentiates a news website from a news blog is that a news website arranges articles in order of importance based on the media outfit’s news valuation. A news blog on the other hand, arranges postings chronologically.

Issues on content are answers to the question: “What is a good blog?”

Without even reading a publication, you’d know whether it is a newspaper or a magazine. After reading it, you’d know whether, in your opinion, it is a good one or not.

But, as I said earlier, the question really is on the listing. Yuga can, for example, limit listings to individual bloggers and bar institutional blogs if the site wants to promote only individual Pinoy bloggers. Yuga can also reject listings of blogs that were put out mainly to advertise one product or service.

Something like
1) Personal
2) Professional

Or
1) Entertainment
2) Technical
3) Personal
4) Mixed
5) Religious

Just to remove the complaints some may have about certain high traffic sites not really being appropriately in Pinoy Top Blogs?

Personally, I don’t really mind if my blog never goes higher in rank. I just like the fact seeing my rank now does encourage me to try and come up with more interesting articles in order to cater to a growing audience base.

I used to be very selfish, writing only about things that concern me. Now I try to write about things I want others to consider being concerned about too. Or about things others might want to know about. Its helped widen the horizons of my blog.

I think it’s hard to qualify blogs based on those three factors. While it will describe some of the blogs out there, it will unfairly classify a million more sites that don’t share the same qualities as the prescribed ones as “non-blogs”.

Format – if it looks like one of those MovableType, WordPress or Blogspot templates…or if it has the post-comments-trackback-sidebar thing going on it’s a blog? What if I don’t use any of the blog publishing services out there and (egad) create my HTML one static page at a time and host it in some God-forsaken free web hosting service like Geocities.com…does it still count as a blog?

Content – if it’s angsty, personal, fresh, interesting, opinionated, or thought-provoking it’s a blog?

Author(s) – I don’t understand this part. Does it mean if it’s by someone who has the gift of web gab it’s a blog?

I think coming up with a univerally accepted blog definition is an excercise in futility.

Question to the group: did the definition dilemma come about because “non-blogs” are “polluting” the PTB results? Are we coming up with a definition to exclude perceived “non-blogs” from the PTB results?

To weed out non-desirables, PTB could come up with a screening committee which will have absolute authority to decide which sites qualify in the PTB. Since it’s a voluntary service, all who participate in it should abide by the site’s rules. In the end, it really won’t matter if it’s a blog or not in the general sense of the word. PTB should be the sole arbiter here, not us.

Peace.

1) format
2) content
3) author(s)

Do we consider just one, two or all of them?

These big websites– are they blogs? I don’t know, really, but I’d like to stick to my pseudo-definition and say that they aren’t. Where is the “I” persona, the speaker, the web logger? Somewhere far away, probably.

On the other hand, a lot of people keep online journals, and a lot of these are, more or less, diary-type entries that I (as the reader) couldn’t care less about. What these people don’t understand (or refuse to subscribe to) is the idea that blogging is a form of self-publishing, and that it is evolving into its own form of literature. Some people refer to this as “hypertext literature.” And anything claiming to be literature should impose a certain discipline on itself–before banging away at their keyboards to talk about how toxic their day was, they should ask: what is good writing? How can I make this interesting to someone who just happens upon my blog?
Or: how does the blogger juggle the reader-writer dynamic?

(A lot of bloggers will say that they don’t claim that what they’re writing is literature. But then again, utilizing the genre is in fact a claim that their entries are literature, in the sense that, as I’ve posited, blogging has evolved. When one writes something and cuts it up into lines and stanzas, isn’t one claiming, albeit implicitly, that it is poetry?)

Ay, ewan. What do you think?

We all know that fresh content is the driver of blog traffic. Individual bloggers such as Manolo, Sassy, JOve et al will be hard pressed to keep up with blogs maintained by a group.

Just about anyone can use a blog!

In fact, according to a Technorati report, there are approximately three million blogs being tracked by mid-2004. And, that number is continuously growing as blog software, tools and other applications become more accessible to individuals.

Blog users are as varied as the types of blogs available. However, they may be categorized in to four main types: personal bloggers, business bloggers, organizational bloggers and professional bloggers.

As the popularity of blogging grows, more and more individuals are finding different ways to use blogs. US Presidential Candidates in 2004, for example, have started using blogs as part of their campaign strategy. It will not be surprising, therefore, if more types of people begin to use blogs. (Shai Coggins, About.com)

Thanks Yuga for inviting me here. I think this is a very interesting entry and the comments are all insightful.

Why not just “dilute” the Hits factor in the ranking equation and add more weight to Votes? Right now, I think the formula’s biased towards high-traffic sites. I bet if INQ7 decides to join the fray, it’ll be on top for eternity and I don’t need a dictionary to know that it isn’t a blog.

The vote system is not foolproof but it is the qualitative nature of the vote (I like this over this) that should, in the end, tell us which is (or isn’t) the top Pinoy blog, not traffic statistics.

I admit that Inside PCIJ defies categorization for me. It clearly does not reflect news articles that can also be read in print media, but its posts are written by journalists with all the comprehensive content and neutrality that comes with the field.

In a sense, it brings us the news. But it’s news that’s written by writers and analysts outside their normal print articles, perhaps specifically for a blog-reading public.

At the moment, I don’t know if the nature of its content belies its own unique method of self-expression, or if it reflects the same aspects that we see in a daily newspaper.

Maybe we can apply the same argument of Intent as that of Citizen Watch here?

I think INSIDE PCIJ website does not meet that kind of requirement. At a first glance, I would never give the impression that it’s a blog site. I view it as a NEWS SITE, the HEADLINES of the news! It may not contain all of the contents of the newspaper, but it does have the headline news..

It could fall into the group blog category, if and only if there’s interaction between the authors. However I see no such interaction among them at all. Comment interaction does not count. It does not make a website a blog.

Also, a blog does not contain itself into one topic only. It should be very diverse!

For the record, I have nothing against the INSIDE PCIJ website because it’s really informative! We’re just talking about its possibilities of being a blog or not. c”,) Nothing personal.

This whole issue’s resolution can probably be found in the query, “What’s in a blog?”

Maybe we should accept Yuga’s earlier definition that a blog is a compendium of time posted posts, be it essays, reviews, stories and the like.

Looking back at the etymology of the word blog, we all know that the word was derived, or should i say, an abbreviated form of the word web log, which can be considered an online diary.

Only know does the confusion happen because so much has been done to blogs. they now come in so many forms.

What i could suggest is that maybe we can come up with a set of guidelines that will discern the blogs from the nonblogs.

That could probably help solve the issue.

I am sending out a short notice to the members of Pinoy Top Blogs and let’s hear what everybody has to say about these.

“Blogging” has a really vague coverage, but I want us pinoy bloggers to really define it a bit more amongst ourselves and re-shape how we look at “true-blue” blogs and “half-blood” blogs.

If anything, I think MaxLimpag’s defense clarifies that this is really not some crass attempt at publicization via PinoyTopBlogs. He raises some excellent points regarding blogging intent as well.