WHAT IS A WEBLOG?

So, first, let's start from the basics. What is a weblog, or blog in short? What does it mean to be a blogger? And why is everone so much into it? Not that long ago, I wrote a longish essay, titled "Blogging the Market", in a section of which I tried to explain in the best possible way what a weblog is all about. That was back in October 2003, but not that much has changed to compel me to do a re-write, at least not anytime soon. So, what is a weblog then?

"Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution (Henry Jenkins 2002)."

It’s quite hard to accurately describe what a weblog really is. Or what people mean when they say they are blogging. One could easily conclude that a weblog is a technology, or a social process culminating in an online phenomenon or even an online kind of a diary, if not to say a new form of journalism. The term is as broadly defined as peer-to-peer, to say the least. In fact, a weblog can be all of the above and none of it. Some people blog for fun, some for business and others for god knows why. Just like any other technology, if we could say that it is a technology, a weblog rests upon the people who adopt it to find a purposeful application for it. Technology shapes people, but people also shape the path upon which technology evolves. What matters is not technology but the use technology will be put into when in the hands of people. The same goes for any social process. Democracy differs enormously from place to place, say from ancient Athens to contemporary Athens. If you think that the above does not make any sense, you’ll be further puzzled down the road. If you ask me what a weblog is, I would say that a weblog is a personal website but not static and unchanging like the websites we’re used to (best examples of which are 99.99 percent of corporate websites), but it can also be a group website where people brainstorm, rant and ramble about whatever is on their mind without paying much attention to typos and consistency in style. A weblog can be updated and change frequently, sometimes many times within a single day, but this of course rests upon how lazy or energetic and passionate the blogger is (or bloggers are). To add further confusion to the above, a weblog can be highly interactive in the sense that random people can play an active part in the ongoing discussion by commenting on what’s already written on the weblog or they can even start an off-the-topic discussion, provided the weblog’s infrastructure allows for such things. On the other hand, a weblog can be a very solitary textual account of one’s feelings and thoughts, a written manifestation of a person’s vanity when an ego trip has taken over and does not allow any space for interactivity with the outer world.

According to the book which tracks the evolution of my favourite weblog from a student’s website to a weblog jointly written and maintained by as many as 30,000 people,

"a weblog can be anything from a journal to a stream of consciousness commentary or even a full-blown news site. The important features are a steady stream of fresh content and a willingness to link to other existing sites as a raison d'être. Think of the Captain’s log on Star Trek and how it usually served to introduce and frame the upcoming story, and add in a very quick feedback loop. For the most part, weblogs are simple and straightforward. People can publish their thoughts, even for the first time, with almost no training (Chromatic et al. 2002)."

A weblog can be a story or just a pointer to a story worth reading and telling others, a conversation or something like an online post-it note with some commentary attached, a professional journalist’s terrain or an amateur writer’s playground, a company’s official online presence or a disgruntled ex-employee’s angry outburst. A weblog is what we make it to be. [LINK]