So I’ve had more than one person tell me that I don’t really have a blog. Some people called it a link blog, other people said it’s just a site but it’s not a blog. This confused me. I’ve been doing … whatever it is I’m doing here for about 10 years. Which is usually about 6 years longer than anyone else on the web. I saw a couple of sites posting stories daily/weekly and decided to emulate them. Writing my own code in classic ASP and then porting it to PHP. Later I bounced from LiveJournal to a tiny service no one else was using called “Blogger”. Eventually I installed my own blogging engine, choosing a tiny PHP based engine called B2. Eventually, B2 would be taken over by Matt Mullenweg and be re-written and re-named to Wordpress. That seemed to work out pretty well for everyone. I bought the lazycoder.com domain back in 2000, so I’ve been posting here for about eight years. I ran Geeklog for a while here before re-installing Wordpress. I was posting here about .NET and ASP before weblogs.asp.net was taken over by Microsoft and before blogs.msdn.com was even online.
So I know a thing or two about “blogging”.
I post what I hope are informative, thoughtful articles/posts/stories on a semi-random basis. They may be long or short. I point to other peoples articles in my posts or via my Del.icio.us account that automatically posts my saved links.
So my question is: If this isn’t a blog, what is it? What defines a blog?
Is this a matter of people defining “blog” in terms of traffic or exposure? Is blogging still just a big popularity contest? Who has the most comments/page hits? Who got a big name or a big site to link to them? Maybe the underlying point that these people don’t want to admit is that blogging is dead. It’s been taken over by big media. There is, and always has been, a HUGE amount of quid pro quo in the blogging world. it’s really kind of sick. Trading links, trading content (“I’ll post about your post if you mention product x”). I’ve managed to avoid all that, mostly because people ignore me due to my low traffic. 
So if you are just starting out blogging, you may have a lot of people tell you that you aren’t “doing it right”. You can choose to either listen to them or not. I don’t have a specific goal for this … whatever it is … other than to work on my communication skills and to propagate ideas on to the web. But remember: history is written by the victors.
6 Comments
I’ll define blog, if you define victory and how it relates to your point.
ha, Rowan wins.
I’ll try the comment again… had 500 error first time
If it walks like a blog, and quakes like a blog, it’s a blog.
Seriously, it’s your space, and if you’re having fun, that’s all that matters.
Rowan: The victors, in this case, are the ones with the most traffic and who have the largest audience. They get to decide what is a blog and what isn’t a blog. Which is silly.
Roberto: Excellent comment. Insightful and concise. I’m interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your blog.
Shelley: That’s what I think too. I’m just surprised that some people would try to narrowly define the word “blog”.
Well I agree with the underlying sentiment that a blog can be whatever you want it to be — I just don’t agree with the throw away statement that blogging is dead just because it’s become “popular”. If you don’t like the link baiting blogs, then don’t subscribe to them.
Rowan: Well, I don’t think that blogging is dead just because it is popular. I think it’s dead because it has been taken over by more traditional media and doesn’t represent the unedited voice of a single person. It used to be that if you found a blog, you knew it was written by a single person and generally represented that persons opinion. Now it’s not unusual to find blogs written by PR/Marketing people where the content represents the company message. It’s rare that a personal blog will get the kind of attention that a corporate blog will. There are a few exceptions, codinghorror.com is one.
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[...] Trading links, trading content (”I’ll post about your post if you mention product x”). I’ve managed to avoid all that, mostly because people ignore me due to my low traffic. So if you are just starting out blogging, you may have a lot ..Is this a blog? [...]
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