What Constitutes a Blog?

My blog at first glance looks like a website, but if you look more closely, I post everyday. My blog has menus, faq, and a store like a site, bit is updated daily with the newest info on cell phones. So whats constitutes a blog, I am not sure. I think maybe blogs are updated more often then typical websites.

Sean,

Again, the disclaimer above but with the clarification that I am not involved in the Sun.Star Network – which runs the website. I merely oversee a part of it (Cebu) and I sometimes volunteer on projects I am interested in like the blogs.

I have been pushing since last year for a blog to be eventually handled by readers because I believe that readers should have more involvement in a news publication – beyond reading the articles. I tried something last year for Sun.Star Cebu (using Pivot – no database backend) but deadlines crushed me and I wasn’t able to finish organizing it.

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You’re partly right. Some of them are that. But many are posts written solely for the blog. I myself wrote an article there – the blog posting was eventually picked up by the network. I submitted that article only to Citizen Watch.

As the site progresses, though, I hope it will have less of these and more of reader postings – which was the reason Citizen Watch was put up in the first place. The facility for greater reader involvement is there, what needs to be done is to encourage readers to use it. You do not take it out because the readers aren’t using it yet.

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Yes. I understand that and I know the website staff understand that. The only reason why there are still postings of links to the articles (instead of just, say, a single post summary of news related to the Arroyo issue) is that readers aren’t posting articles yet. They feel more comfortable writing their thoughts using the comments facility. They have been invited, some through e-mail, to post their thoughts as blog articles and not just through the comments facility. A few have said they would. Maybe in the next few days or weeks, we’d see that.

The intention in putting out the site was for readers to be more involved in the publication. It’s not so crude as to “advertise” the site because the Sun.Star site is definitely more popular than the Citizen Watch blog. The blog represents less than one percent of the website traffic. The website gets millions of page views weekly.

But I think the issue here isn’t really on labels. It’s about the listing in PinoyBlog. I’m at fault here because I was the one who encouraged them to list the site there, again not for advertising but just to be part of the community. I say not for advertising because the blog is being promoted in the Sun.Star network home page and the home pages of the different branches, which get a huge amount of traffic. It’s being promoted in print – in the different Sun.Star papers. My wife wants to take the listing out. I say it’s a mistake but my thoughts don’t count – it’s the website’s decision.

Thanks Sean for the very good points you raised.

“A blog is a personal diary.”

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.

If there’s anything that would likely be referenced by this debate, it would be the nature and intention of Inside PCIJ as well.

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?

It’s not just about traffic statistics, or politics, or journalism. What constitutes a blog I guess is the CONTENT.

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.

I’m not too big on definitions and pigeon-holing, but maybe a “blog” should contain personal thoughts/insights/experiences that are written in such a way that they arouse interest from the the general, anonymous reader. What I mean is, someone surely is “logging” on (it is a weblog, isn’t it?) and that someone should surface through the style of writing, the argumentation, etc. But more than that, it should be well aware that there is a reader, and that the reader may or may not know him; the blog should be something that transcends the merely personal.

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?

My $0.02 ulit.

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.

I think the word blog describes a publishing format. Here’s part of Wikipedia’s current entry on it:

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.

Re # 17. On authors. No, nothing as elitist as that.

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.

on 22. Hi Marc, friendster blogs are powered by Typepad hehe.

sa dami ng blog sa mundo, adhikain ni yuga ang pagsasamahin ang mga blog na gawa ng pinoy hindi isyu ang kung gaano karami ang bumibisita sa bawat pinoyblog. basta pinoy, tungkol sa pinoy, may relasyon sa pinoy, nakadikit sa pinoy, puwede natin ito isama sa pinoy blog.

pinoy muna bago blog…

You posted “how is an online newspaper NOT a blog? It clearly reflects the opinions of multiple people on a single site.”

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

I dont think blogs are any different than forums. It has the same look and feel except the back end to add the content is a little different and slightly more managable. The true vaue is in the forums because it gets views involved in the process and the layout are entirely different.

Long live the bloggerss!!