an article called Blogging Across America, which is fine and great except that the site the author built is NOT a weblog. “Weblog” is not just the newfangled name for a personal website. It is a specific form of personal site, a subset of all the different kinds of personal site one could maintain. Within the category there are almost innumerable options – but at base, chronological organization is essential, and I would say links and commentary on those links as well.
Michael Boyle's weblog
aj says
Hm. I wonder, given that the stated purpose of a weblog is to log web sites one has been to, whether the purest form of blogging implies you can’t do anything original in it, merely point out other things via links and comment upon them…
So in that case, where does the original content come from?
tbit says
obviously, your own personal take on those sites.
Michael says
That’s one stated purpose, AJ, but not the only purpose. I do think that links are essential, but I wouldn’t suggest that anything other than the links is non-weblog. Or conversely that weblogs must therefore be non-original.
The definition game can be silly, obviously. There’s no purity test. But at the same time, there has to be >some
Martine says
Trends and social use of software has never been PC World’s strength, much to the despair of all the liberal arts students who used to work for the magazine…
Looks like this article is simply mis-titled. It shouldn’t have been called blogging but something like “self-publishing while on the road”. It’s strange to hear the mention “blog” when all they talk about is Geocities! I felt like I was reading an article from 1995. Weird.
I do agree that to be called a blog, a Web site should be both a mix of links and some original content (even if it’s only an opinion on these links). But I don’t know what to think of the photoblogs, which are only a photo and some text (no links), and travel blogs, which rarely have links. Should they be called “photo diaries” instead?
The line between blogs and diaries is getting thinner and thinner and the mainstream media has already stopped making a difference between the two (if they ever noticed one).
But PC World? You’d think they’d know better.