Posted on August 27, 2007 at 11:51 pm | 
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[Update] Thanks to Gerry Hanratty I can see that Mike Arrington agrees with my definition of a blog.
I was first prompted to write this post when one of Segala’s Certified Partners directed me to their ‘blog’. I can’t remember why, I think it was regarding the design and it was asking us to review it for accessibility standards compliance.
I was bemused when I was unable to converse with the author by leaving a comment. It wasn’t the first time I witnessed this, but it was the first time it (almost) frustrated me. All I could think of was ‘why?’ Why not just call it a Personal Web site?!
A few weeks later a Microsoft colleague directed me to the same agency’s white paper on Web 2.0 as he found it very interesting. So, here’s an agency that clearly understands Web 2.0 but yet, wasn’t sure whether to enable comments on its ‘blog’ or not. I was delighted to see comments later enabled as a direct result of my personal feedback on the subject though.
Personal Web sites have been around for a very long time. Running commentary on subjects such as movies and sport isn’t a good enough reason to call your Web site a blog.
A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) or sexual topics (Adult blog), and are part of a wider network of social media.
The bit that interests me most is, “The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.”
Calling a Web site which allows two-way conversations a blog, is a way of benchmarking time, technology and/or techniques. The very same can be said for Web 2.0. Although, Web 2.0 principles have been around longer than the term itself, Web 2.0 enables us to talk about the same stuff, well, sort of. Most of the confusion in my opinion, appears to be around whether people are talking about technology or marketing.
One could argue that if your comment is worthy enough, it should in fact warrant its own post on your own blog, thereby mitigating the need for comments in the first place. However, this is a cop out and doesn’t counter my argument to use the term ‘blog’ when referring to Web sites that enable comments from readers.
Sethi Godin, Dave Winer and Russell Beattie are just 3 people who call their Personal Web sites blogs. Perhaps people like Winer can get away with it as people are very likely to write posts on their own blogs and then link back to his original article.
Perhaps a few people should be given a ‘get out of jail free’ card? Can they get away with being an exception to the rule?
For me, ‘blog’s without comments is just evil 99.9% of the time. There must be a very good reason not to have comments on a full time basis.
13 Comments
So far,
August 28, 2007 @ 
good writee
Julian Bond
I don’t know what a blog is, but I know one when I see one.
For me Comments is not a requirement, but an RSS/Atom feed is. And I can well understand why people turn off comments when dealing with spam and moderation can be a huge and unwelcome extra workload.
I also think that Blog Comments are a really bad way to have conversations because it’s typically so hard to follow up and see what other people have said about your comment.