Our bold blog definition
Sunday, April 16
4:43 PM
Though this essay's primary concern is explicating the diary weblog, it would be futile to attempt a non-arbitrary theorization of the diary weblog if the blog itself were left undefined — and so the blog itself presents the first definitional problem. There are, in fact, very few essential blog features. Blogs are a kind of online writing, and so must appear online: blogs that have been published in book form become "blooks." Blogs are published on websites, though their content may be accessible through syndication in another medium like email or Really Simple Syndication. Blogs are composed of one or more individual entries or "posts" which, though usually text, can also consist of still images, audio, video, or any combination of these media. Once there is more than one post, a blog is arranged so that more recent entries are displayed before older ones: this is the system Walker and others call "reverse-chronological order." In order to make the reverse-chronological ordering perceptible, blogs "time-stamp" entries, usually explicitly ("posted at 2:23 a.m. on February 15, 2006") but sometimes implicitly. The blog "Overheard in New York" is a good example of the latter category: individual posts are not time-stamped; instead, those closer to the heading for a given day are presumed to be more recent. While this list of traits is somewhat preliminary — in the taxonomy section, I'll offer a more logically rigorous method for defining genres — for the purposes of this paper these are the only features essential to the blog.
Many commentators would disagree with this assertion, so it's important to note some of the common features often erroneously considered essential, foremost among them the notion that blogs are "self-published." Blogs are often described as "self-published," but while it's true that publishing your own blog is incredibly simple, the blogosphere contains many prominent examples which fail to live up to that term, whatever it's taken to mean. Most bloggers use third-party web-publishing sites like Blogger or LiveJournal, instead of writing all the code themselves. Some bloggers have written their entries on paper and had other people type and publish them. At other blogs, for example those hosted by MSNBC, editors or copy editors review submissions before they're posted. And blogs like "PostSecret," a collection of postcards, deal exclusively in content submitted by other people and selected by an editor. While it's obvious that blogs do not go through the traditional print publishing process, many of the steps in that process can carry over to web-publishing. The idea that self-publishing is crucial to the weblog persists in part because it is well-matched to the individualistic, tech-optimist ethos still prevalent in the blogosphere.[1]
Other blog definitions exclude old, new, or unpopular weblogs. Many theorists dwell on the "frequent" nature of weblog posts, but while a blog like "Boing Boing" might have several dozen entries a day, other blogs go weeks, even months without entries — there's no cut-off point at which "Tequila Mockingbird," a popular diary weblog currently four months into an unannounced hiatus, will cease to be a blog. Moreover, the same defense holds for archived or defunct blogs — the genre status of "ToTo247's Xanga Site" was not altered when the blogger's tragic death made future updates impossible. Theorists have also excluded newly-created blogs from their definitions, by mentioning a "series" of posts, for example. While it's true that a blog with only one post doesn't yet contain updates in reverse-chronological order, most readers and many web-publishing sites (e.g. Blogger, WordPress, MSN Spaces) equate the publication of the first post with the creation of the blog. A blog doesn't become a blog with the second post — the second post merely confirms (or confounds) the reader's expectation that this last essential feature will be present. A new weblog may also lack incoming or outgoing links, but restricting the definition of blog to cover only those sites which are participating in a blogosphere-level conversation would unnecessarily exclude thousands of diary weblogs.
Unlike the web forum — with which it shares many similarities — the blog is often assumed to have a limited, self-selected number of post authors. However, as new technologies allow people to contribute to the blogosphere through email or with their cell phones, this distinction becomes increasingly invalid. Some blogs, "Katrina Aftermath" for example, allow anyone to create new entries and comment on existing posts. Nevertheless, while such blogs break down the boundaries between the weblog and the web forum and create overlap between the two genres, blogs still differ from web forums in that a community of authors is still an optional rather than essential feature of the genre. With the invention of the diary weblog, blogs and online journals have a similar conceptual relationship: essential features of the latter appear as optional features in the former.
Finally, many features now considered essential are easily revealed as optional, for the simple reason that many blogs have only recently adopted them. As early weblogger Tom Coates has noted, "There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us — so seemingly obvious — that we forget that they actually had to be invented." Justin Hall began blogging in 1994, and the term "weblog" was coined on December 17, 1997, but according to Coates, permanent links to individual blog posts, now known as "permalinks," were invented years later. Likewise, Blogger users did not have built-in comment fields or titles on their posts until the summer of 2004. Many blogs still don't make use of these features, though that hasn't stopped theorists from conflating the essential with the merely typical.
Footnotes
[1] This ethos was memorably captured by early Blogger slogans like "push-button publishing for the people" and "the revolution will be bloggerized." C.f. Rak, 171. Back
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