“So What Is A Blog?”
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
“So What Is A Blog?”
A blog is basically a type of website, like a forum or a social bookmarking site. As such it is defined by the technical aspects and features around it, and not by the content published inside it.
The features that make blogs different from other websites are:
Keep in mind that it is the bundle of those features that should define a blog. An online forum could also offer an RSS feed for example, but that would not make it a blog.
“Blogs Aren’t Always Personal”
The main misconception regarding the definition of blogs comes from people that associate blogs with their content. More specifically from people that associate blogs with the content from one particular type of blog: personal blogs.
In other words, those people think that blogs are online diaries where people share their opinions, ramblings and personal events.
Wrong!
That is just one of the things that you could do with a blog.
Today blogs are being used for all sorts of purposes. You have companies that use blogs to communicate and interact with customers and other stake holders. Newspapers that incorporated blogs to their main website to offer a new channel for their writers. Individuals that created a blog to share with the world their expertise on specific topics. And so on.
“Separate The Content”
If you separate the content from the website, it becomes much easier to work with the definitions.
Consider a person that wants to publish a Questions / Answers column online.
They could use several types of websites for that purpose.
They could create an online forum, for example, where each thread would be an answer to a specific question. They could create a static HTML website and publish all the questions and answers on a single page. They could create a wiki where users would be able to edit the questions and answers directly. Finally, they could also create a blog where each post would contain a question and its answer.
Blogs represent a social phenomenon, so they are in constant evolution. The Internet itself is changing very fast, so pin pointing a single definition for blogging is a hard task.
The definition above is only one, and I am sure that other people will want to add or remove details to it. Some might even completely disagree.
I want to know what you think a blog is?
The characteristics that define it?
Is the definition changing over time?
Start making money today with your own blog.