No one really knows and you will find a plenty of arguments. However, I will aver that a blog, for our discussion anyhow, must have the following:
- A diary-like organization. That is, entries or content are organized chronologically.
- Ability to include comments from readers, generally without the intervention of the blog owner.
That's it. There are a tremendous variety of blogs. Generally, though, you will find the entries at most blogs are short. There are lots of links at blogs, links to other blogs or other material that's central to the blog's mission. Blogs often refer to other blogs. There is frequently a strong authorial presence at a blog. In other words, blogs are usually about personality.
But really, you have to get into the blogosphere to smell one or two up close.
Here's what opinion writer Kathleen Parker had to say about blogs in a July, 2003 piece at Townhall.com:
“…what I once loved about journalism went missing some time ago and seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere: a high-spirited, irreverent, swashbuckling, lances-to-the-ready assault on the status quo. While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicles deciphering management's latest “tidy desk” memo, bloggers are building bonfires and handing out virtual leaflets along America's Information Highway.
In some areas, bloggers are beating the knickers off mainstream reporters and commentators.
Journalist and blogger J.D. Lasica had this to say:
A blog is “a Web site that's updated on a regular basis in reverse chronological order and includes a time stamp. A lot of people in the media keep calling them online diaries or personal journals and I don't think that's quite right.” Lasica describes blogs as the ground zero of the “personal media revolution”
Sheila Lennon, a staff journalist at Providence (R.I.) Journal says this:
“A blog is just a form. There are no rules about it.” She says all you need is a permalink — that's about it for the rules. “[You get] Incoming information, you just package it as quickly as you can and get it out there and have a two-way exchange with your readers.”
So how big is this blogging thing? Well, it's pretty big and getting bigger but, in my opinion, it's not replacing anything just yet. It's a great resource for journalists and it offers the potential for journalists who blog to reach new audiences and, for freelancers, the potential for new income. Various surveys have been done about blogging and here's the latest stats: Depending on how you measure it, between two and seven per cent of all North American Internet users maintain a blog or participate in a community blog. But just one in ten North American Internet users regularly read a blog and the odds are they likely read a handful of the world's most popular blogs.
“Blogs . . . are atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to turn an election into a story. When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary. Marshall couldn't turn his gift for parsing the news of the moment to the more patient task of turning reportage into scenes and characters so that the candidates and the voters take life online. He didn't function as a reporter; there was, as there often is with blogs, too much description of where he was sitting, what he was thinking, who'd just walked into the room, as if the enclosed space in which bloggers carry out their work had followed Marshall to New Hampshire and kept him encased in its bubble. He might as well have been writing from his apartment in Washington. But the failure wasn't personal; this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them enough and any subject will go dead.”
What are the world's most popular blogs? Let's take a look at one ranking from a site called Technorati, set up specifically to track activity in the blogosphere.
Technorati maintains a service which tries to rank the most popular blogs in the world. It is a ranking of blogs based on the number of links at other Web sites to the blog in question. Here's the Top 100 right now.
And we'll leave the last word here to novelist and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith:
The blog phenomenon is perhaps the strangest side of the Internet. It's stranger even than all the porn. Thousands of unremarkable people are posting their diaries on-line. Sometimes these blogs contain humorous commentary on global current events or local politics.
Sometimes — and more often — they contain a list of daily activities. “Went to the post office, managed to do laundry, talked to Jason about Our Relationship . . .” Who do they expect will read them?
Well, Jason, of course.