What Is A Blog?

Blogs Aren’t Necessarily Personal

The main misconception regarding the definition of blogs comes from people that associate blogs with their content. More specifically from people that associate blogs with the content from one particular type of blog: personal blogs.

In other words, those people think that blogs are online diaries where people share their opinions, ramblings and personal events.

Wrong!

That is just one of the things that you could do with a blog.

Today blogs are being used for all sorts of purposes. You have companies that use blogs to communicate and interact with customers and other stake holders. Newspapers that incorporated blogs to their main website to offer a new channel for their writers. Individuals that created a blog to share with the world their expertise on specific topics. And so on.

Separate The Content

If you separate the content from the website, it becomes much easier to work with the definitions.

Consider a person that wants to publish a Questions & Answers column online. She could use several types of websites for that purpose.

She could create an online forum, for example, where each thread would be an answer to a specific question. She could create a static HTML website and publish all the questions and answers on a single page. She could create a wiki where users would be able to edit the questions and answers directly. Finally, she could also create a blog where each post would contain a question and its answer.

As you can see, the content is not attached to the website. The picture below illustrates that (note that only four types of websites were used, but there are many more).

Obviously one type of website will be more suitable for a certain purpose than others. It would be easier for a company to use an online forum on its customer support section, for instance.

So What Is A Blog?

A blog is basically a type of website, like a forum or a social bookmarking site. As such it is defined by the technical aspects and features around it, and not by the content published inside it.

The features that make blogs different from other websites are:

• content is published in a chronological fashion
• content is updated regularly
• readers have the possibility to leave comments
• other blog authors can interact via trackbacks and pingbacks
• content is syndicated via RSS feeds

Keep in mind that it is the bundle of those features that should define a blog. An online forum could also offer an RSS feed for example, but that would not make it a blog.