What is a blog? Take Too
architecture | book | design | McLuhan | internet | paths | rear view mirror | xml
I 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 Immediately I thought of blogs and my unpublished work "Multiple Paths To the Same Information."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.
Weblog Business Strategies Conference - Boston June 2003
The who's who of the blogsphere gathered in Boston to witness the coming of age of blogs. No longer are blogs just for bleeding edge or info junkies. Blogs have meet business and there are now some gold diggers poking around.
Let's start at the beginning. Unlike email and web pages, the technology does not define a blog. Therefore, there is no all encomposing definition.
David Weinberger, famous author, (full disclosure: college friend) gave the definition that they tend to be web pages (sites) updated daily, with a few paragraphs, in reverse chronological order, linked in and have a voice. Not all have these features, they just tend to. Regardless of the definition, there is no doubt that blogs are an important new tool.
David Winer, Berkman Fellow at Harvard, said that just as organizations had to learn to trust employees to use the phone, the web and email, so too will enterprises have to trust that blogs will be used professionally. Major Chris Chambers stated that employees have laready bought into "organization's voice," so it should of little concern to let employees do blogs. Others stated that the expectations should be clearly stated up front for the employees. And Weinberger added "holes would be punched in the company fortress" one way or the other - so clamping down makes the problem worse.
Few examples were presented of business use of blogs. For one, businesses conduct their business behind a firewall so their blogs are not public. Also, blogs in business are so new, there are just not many examples. However two were
America's Army's blog from Afganistan and
Boston's Globe's HR blog.
A thread on blogs and journalism was kept up through most of the day. David Winer thought that there is no difference between a blogger and a reporter, though not all blogs are used for journalism. He states that for almost any activity in journalism, you can find a like activity in blogging. For example, the editting in blogs is done by the readers who comment on the blog. And bloggers should follow two rules: disclose any conflict of interest (e.g. Flash Goirl states she works at Microsoft) and don't say stuff you know is not true. Weinberger continued the tread talking about objectiveness. It expounded on the philosophy of the M and M candy view of self. That we are only authentic when we reveal through the outer shell the true innner self. This is a view of honesty. (Maybe you had to be there.) Anyway, we know that no one can be completely objective. And blogs, though they tend to be more subjective, the number of blogs allow multi-subjectivity. In other words, you get multiple points a view - though each subjective - which can provide you with reports that are closer to the truth.
In an exchange during the first panel, a debate about "pitching" a product erupted with a conclusion that an effective pitch is targeted. But many of the audience disagreed that they did not need to be educated by a pitch. So there appears to be much work to be done about blogs and PR.
In the post session chatting, I had an interesting talk with Dave Winer about RSS. It was surprising that RSS had not been mentioned the entire day, even during the tech/tools panel. I told him about McLuhan's Law of Media about pushing a technology to an extreme. Blogs are now pushed to that extreme that you just can not use your web browser to read them all (over 1.5 million registerants at Blogger.com). The only solution is RSS readers. We both agreed that there is not much time for the blogging industry to get its act together on RSS before we have to do it Microsoft's way.
The afternoon panel missed that most organizations can not resuse content. Each audience requires it to be repurposed (rewritten). This was the oversell of CMS.
Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, thought blogging was in the equivalent of the VisiCalc age of spreadsheets. We haven't seen Lotus 1-2-3 yet and can not imagine the Excel age. He also pointed out that access control to blogs is very important for businesses. I think businesses say they need it more than they do, but they still do really need it.
Learnings for the organization. Once an organization gets over the fear of blogs, I think the biggest learning was to start taking some email communications and moving them into blogs. For example, every department produces weekly report. Emailed to everyone in the department and forwarded to a person who merges them all together. Then they are emailed back out. Why not just have each department put theirs into a blog (and RSS). And if comments were allowed, that would certainly flatten the organization! There are other examples, but there certainly can be a place for blogs in most organizations.
I'll read the many other blogs from the conference's second day and post more later.
What is a Blog?
design | internet | mcluhan | newsletters | paths | xml
Dave Winer posted a long draft essay trying to define a blog. Here's my take:
Blog is a term used to describe a type of web page or web site. These are some of the possible attributes:
- The information is usually posted chronologically with a title, text and a link.
- No special software is needed to create a blog. (Therefore, it is more difficult to define than email or a web page). The same software used to read and write a web page can be used for a blog. However, there are several software offerings which simply the publishing and often offer special features.
- Blogs can be part of a larger web site or be an indepedent site. Because publishing on the web is very low cost (or even free), the majority of blogs are not associated with a larger web site.
- Most blogs are written by one person, though there are group blogs. This self-publishing loses some of the journalistic review but adds a personal voice to most blogs.
- There is a trend to distribute blogs through email and news syndication (RSS). This is starting to blur the distinction between some enewsletters and blogs.
While most blogs have very short blurbs with links to other web pages, I don't believe this is an attribute of blogs. Eric McLuhan in Electric Language: Understanding the Message points out that over time our paragraphs have gotten shorter. I think we are just seeing this trend continue with blogs and other internet writing (e.g., instant messaging).
I've been wrestling with this definition while working on bletter. I believe that the majority of blog content will be distributed in three simultaneous ways: enewsletters, syndication and the web. The emphasis on which method will depend on the content and the audience. And as we see this change, our definition of a blog will mostlikely change too.
