My husband and I were having a discussion this evening about blogging. He has been blogging for a little while now but has been reading blogs regularly for about a year. He says that a blog is a record of things one finds on the web and comments on. When I look at technorati's 100 top blogs (http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html), I see that they are rated on the basis of numbers of links and numbers of sources. This would tend to support his view of blogs.
When I look at Wikipedia's definition of a blog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog), though, I see that it includes everything from online diaries to the kind of blogs technorati is talking about to corporate and political blogs.
So my question is this: What is a blog, really? Is it one certain kind of thing or is it open to each person's interpretation? Are there rules that I don't know yet or is it pretty free-form? These are only some of the questions I hope to answer as we move through this course.
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4 comments:
Let me ask you this.
What is television?
Is it a news program? Or a drama? Does it deal with social issues? Perhaps it's a private communication between home office and the branch? It can be all those things because television isn't a product. It's a process.
Likewise a blog isn't a kind of content, it's a method of communication. What sets it apart from other channels is that the barrier to entry -- that is, the ability to have a voice in the media stream -- is low enough that almost anybody (including homeless people) can participate.
I believe that defining blogs in terms of content -- diary, journalism, commentary, literature -- misses the essential nature of blogs as medium.
Thanks, Nathan! That's kind of what I thought, but I wasn't really sure. And I like the analogy to television -- something we all know and love?
Hello there:
Thanks for your comments! You asked what a blog is.
It seems to me that the best answer was given by Barbara Dieu, Buthaina Al Othman,Teresa Almeida d’ Eça in their BelNATE PPP : 'A blog is what YOU want it to be'.
Check out Bee's Blog, and then click on " We blog. What about you? "
I quite agree with what Anne Davis said today ... the possibilities of blogs are unlimited ... even if you think only of bloggging in TEFL there's so much that can be done ... I think it is basically related to one's creativity ...
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