What Makes a Blog?
Today in the sky: Here’s another interesting example of a USA Today blog. It’s about air travel, of all things. Ben Mutzabaugh posts at least a dozen things a day about airlines. He seems awfully well informed. Now, I’m not interested in the subject, but I’m curious about the evolution of the…
The document discusses the evolution of the “blogging form” and the characteristics that make a blog a blog. It uses a USA Today blog as an example, noting that it has short, informative entries in reverse chronological order but lacks RSS, a homepage, and categories. The author suggests that the “blogging form’s” evolution could be influenced by the adoption of RSS by large media outlets, and proposes a grading system for blog-like features.
Generated by Azure AI on June 24, 2024Today in the sky: Here’s another interesting example of a USA Today blog. It’s about air travel, of all things. Ben Mutzabaugh posts at least a dozen things a day about airlines. He seems awfully well informed.
Now, I’m not interested in the subject, but I’m curious about the evolution of the “blogging form.” Is this a blog? well, yeah, I think – it has short, informative entries in reverse chronological order.
There’s no RSS (they have to push ads, after all), no blogroll, and no categories, but it’s very close to what we hardcores would call a blog. (Sites like USA Today have a fixation with HTML because they want to display ads. I wonder if RSS advertising outlets (like Kalsey’s Pheedo for instance) will break this wall and push big outlets like this into RSS.)
So, if we get a big outlet like USA Today into RSS, then we have one more characteristic of “bloggi-ness.” What’s left? A blogroll? Comments? Trackback? What would it take for it to be a blog to the core?
Put another way, I think we look at blogs as made up of certain characteristics, and we rate the “bloggi-ness” of a site by how many of those characteristics it implements. We could keep a simple scorecard. Even have a certification process – it’s that clear cut.
Right now, this blog seems very “outside” the blogosphere. It maintains its professional roots by not sinking into the comments/RSS/trackback morass with the rest of us. What would happen if it did? What would happen if a big media outlet sold their soul to the blogging world and implemented a “traditional” blog? It’d certainly be interesting.