What is a blog? Take Too
architecture | book | design | McLuhan | internet | paths | rear view mirror | xmlI think I fell into the trap of the review mirror - defining things by looking at the past. Let me try again.
A blog is posted in HTML to be read with a browser. So is a web site. What is the difference? Inside a hardcover (or softcover) is a book. Could be a novel or a poem. What is the difference? Go to the library full of books. Some fiction, some non-fiction, some references. Maybe a catalog. At last a clue, but I needed more.
I've been reading Linked by Barabasi and found research that most of the web is unseen by search engines. I would have never have guessed. Then later this amazing stat: "Documents with only one incoming link have only a 10% chance to be notice by any serach engine. In contrast, robots find and index 90 percent of pages that have twenty-one to one hundred incoming links." Immediately I thought of blogs and my unpublished work "Multiple Paths To the Same Information." It is blogs with their multiple paths that allow search engines to find more and more of the internet.
A novel has a different composition than a poem. Likewise, a blog has different paths than a web site. In my perspective, a standard web site is more like that reference book in the library - important but not newsworthy. While most web sites do have some news, the majority of the content rarely changes daily. Nor does it include many new links. The difference is that blogs are update daily or at least regularly and contain many new links.
The type of links are also different. On a web site, typically, the majority of the links are internal as the marketing objective is to keep your "sticky" eyeballs on the site. On a blog, the majority of the links go outside. This makes blogs a different type of document.
All of this begs the philosophical paraphrased question: Does a blog (in the woods) make a noise if it links to no one? Or is a blog without links a blog? Maybe so, but probably not a well "written" blog.
Blogs are the next generation of web sites. After years of creating web sites, we've learned how to write for the web. We've learned that readers of web sites scan, they veiw only a few pages and then click off to another site. This is how bloggers write - short, poetic writting with rarely a link to a backup document and with plenty of other sites to click off to. For example, site navigation is not an issue for blogs. Bloggers write how users like to "read" the web.
We should have had a hint from the term "blogsphere." A blog is not a self contained document, but provides "multiple paths to the same information." Blogs are fuel for the Google engine.
posted by Ray @ Thursday, June 19, 2003
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