How do people usually define blogging?

They tend to say that it’s about organizing posts by reverse chronological order. That it’s about writing in the first person. That’s it’s about being more personal. That’s it’s a social thing. That it’s about personal sites.

Yeah right. Like we had no news sites before? No forums with personal opinions before? No personal home pages before? No discussion boards before?

To me, the main difference blogging makes is this:

  • Before blogging, all kinds of people tended to talk about a specific subject in a specific place (forum, mailing list).
  • After blogging, a specific person tends to talk about all kinds of subjects in a specific place (his personal blog).

This central paradigm shift now triggers a series of changes all other the web: we need trackback & aggregators to replace discussion threads & forums. We need new website ranking algorythms based on more complex criterias than inbound links alone. We have new forms of (referer, comment…) spam to cope with…

Then… comes collaborative blogging… where bloggers unite their efforts to publish a multi-authored blog. This then very much looks like an old-school news site or forums. Well it’s still clearly different from forums since the authors are limited/selected and the new guy can only post in the comments section.

But as far as news sites are concerned, I’m not sure there really is a difference with what existed before… Maybe it’s just easier than before to set up the tools needed for collaborative publishing. (Well, with b2evolution it certainly is! ;D)

Comments from long ago:

Comment from: padawan

There’s is a fundamental difference between forums and blogs. In forums, all registered participants can launch a new discussion (thread). In a blog, the editorial agenda, and the associated discussions, is managed by the blog author(s).

2005-12-11 15-32

Comment from: Le blog de Thierry Klein

Une nouvelle forme de graphomanie : la bloggomanie / Bloggomania : a new form of graphomania"Graphomania is not the desire to write letters, personal diaries, family chronicles (i.e to write for himself or for his own relations) but the desire to write books (i.e to have a public audience of unknown readers).

Un truc qui ne sert à rien

2005-12-12 23-15