What is a blog, really? <\/p>\n
Janice P. talked to me about blogging for an article for a McMaster publication and we got talking about guilt and blogging. Like the journals I used to keep and the research note books I kept up until I started this blog, I feel guilty if I don’t post on a regular basis (lets say once a week.) <\/p>\n
On her blog she comments on guilt and blog death. (Hi JP!) <\/p>\n
I wonder if the blog hasn’t reopened all our worries around journals and immortalizing everyday thoughts. Someone must have written on this.
\n
\nSo what is a blog? I would distinquish between two senses of “blog”. <\/p>\n
1. Blog software like Movable Type or Greymatter<\/a>. This software can be used for journal-like sequences or for other uses. For example, in the Ivanhoe<\/a> project we used Greymatter to run a prototype of a game and in other cases I have seen group blogs that look a lot like Web archives of small e-mail conferences.<\/p>\n 2. Blog culture. This is what is interesting. The software is just a variant on Web based discussion systems, but the variant has been designed and used in an interesting and coherent way that connects to a genre of writing we all know – the journal. Blogger (I think) deserves credit for getting the paradigm right, offering it for free, and promoting people’s blogs. Dave Winer of Scripting News<\/a> also deserves credit for recognizing blogging, promoting it, and adapting Frontier to fit the paradigm.<\/p>\n Blog culture seems to be taking shape like just about everything else in the mediasphere. A small number of people\/entities get lots of attention while most participate vicariously running essentially private and unread blogs. <\/p>\n Browsing quickly on the issue of blogs I note that there is now discussion about an “Alist” of blogs that get most of the attention. You can go to Top 100 feeds<\/a> and see who they are. There is also a discussion about how blogs, because they link to each other closely, end up distorting Google. Google may rank higher a blog entry about something than a well thought out site\/page on the subject. Hmmm … more to research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is a blog, really? Janice P. talked to me about blogging for an article for a McMaster publication and we got talking about guilt and blogging. Like the journals I used to keep and the research note books I kept up until I started this blog, I feel guilty if I don’t post on … Continue reading Blogging and Janice’s blog<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-culture-and-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}