What makes a blog?
Here is how I characterize a blog:
The main unit is the post, with a title, body text, and maybe some categories for organization. The post sometimes has a bunch of links to help support the topic of the post. Interestingly, posts are best when short (I fail there sometimes) and to the point. Post are then organized in reverse chronological order, newest at the top.
OK, so that’s not much different than a regular web page. Press release pages invariably have this structure, but so do many other types of pages (indeed, I ran a whole website like this that I now know was a proto-blog).
But, two key characteristics, I think, define the blog. One is the permalink, a permanent link to the post that allows the whole world to stably link to it without fear of losing the information (absolutely not a feature of the current Web).
The other key characteristic is the ability to leave comments. Comments allow the blogger to have a conversation. Whereas forums are sort of conversations, they are usually many to many. A blog is usually a conversation of one (the one who posts) to many, with the many participating in an almost guided conversation (that’s different than a forum, for the most part).
Here’s a great encyclopedia entry about blogs from Wikipedia.
My previous post from this string of posts - Blogging is not mainstream.
Filed under: Charlie, General, How to Blog, Why Blog?
I read something the other day - I don’t remember where - that the only thing that all blogs tend to have in common is the aspect of chronological posts.
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However, the only thing a blog truly needs is the permalink. I’m a fan of comments, but there are many good blogs without them. The permalink is then vital to those types of blogs as it’s their only avenue of conversation.
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In essence, blog posts don’t always require comment, but the feature of the forum post is that they do.