Few people agree on how to define a weblog, or blog. Most will agree that the term “weblog” was created by Jorn Barger on his Robot Wisdom Web site in 1997, and “blog” by Peter Merholz in 1999. The Oxford English Dictionary has included both since March 2003, the watershed year for blogging popularity and use; weblog, as used today, is, in definition 2, "a frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary." OED’s rule of thumb for inclusion is five references over five years; it lists four for “weblog,” two related to Barger and two showing divergent blog usage: “simply a site where you post your thoughts whenever the muse strikes” and “a way to be stupendously well informed . . . scour[ing] the highlights in weblogs.” These unresolved content and target-audience differences settle the weblog today into one of two broad types: the filter-style blog or the freestyle blog. In either case, the essential is a truly personal (unedited) voice and good links to original sources.

The freestyle blog is currently accepted blog practice, so much so that the newspaper columnist, Miss Manners, has stepped in, saying that the blog, “just an old-fashioned diary in which every personal secret thought is recorded,” creates a “concern to etiquette [in] the way bloggers write about other people.” Miss Manners must not yet have seen the egregious public embarrassments of MoBlogs, or mobile phone photo blogs. Etiquette aside, the issue of weblogs and libel in the U.S. is being carefully monitored. In July 2003, a federal appeals court ruled “that online publishers can post material generated by others without liability for its content — unlike traditional news media, which are held responsible for such information.” Bloggers, are, however, still looking over one shoulder for libel suits arising from their blog, all the while looking over the other for ways to block comment spam.

The link-driven filter-style blog is closer to responsible journalism, with critical thinking, reasoned attacks on opinion, acerbic comments, and civil public-arena dialogue. These blogs are micro-portals focused on the world-at-large rather than a single personal microcosm.

In the they-said-it-better-than-I-could area: “The weblogging microcosm has evolved into a distinct form, into a community of publishers. The strong sense of community amongst bloggers distinguishes weblogs from the various forms of online publications such as online journals, 'zines and newsletters that flourished in the early days of the web and from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television. The use of weblogs primarily for publishing, as opposed to discussion, differentiates blogs from other online community forums, such as Usenet newsgroups and message boards. Often referred to as the blogsphere, the network of bloggers is a thriving ecosystem, with its own internally driven dynamics.”

Disclaimer: This article relies on North American blogging, does not intend to disregard or disrespect blogging in other parts of the world, and invites input on the latter for Weblogs updates.

“. . . blinded to historical precedent”

The filter-style blog, which purists claim is the real thing, descended directly from the first Web page, created at the end of 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, a simple link filter listing Web sites of interest, a concept that evolved into Web directories such as the first Yahoo! Web site, a directory of a limited number of Web pages selected by human beings for usefulness and interest. Many metablog sites are still close to this type. The filter-style blog now is often a media digest of hyperlinks organized around a particular topic, accompanied by commentary and inviting feedback.

Both filter-style and freestyle blogs have delivered on the implicit promise that the World Wide Web would be an interactive worldwide community in a dynamic way that Usenet discussion groups in the 80s, Web pages in the 90s, MUDs and MOOs, never completely managed. To “democracy” and “community,” the rallying cries used for grassroots’ communication via Citizens’ Band (CB) radio in the 70s and electronic bulletin boards in the 80s, has been added “literary expression,” as “to blog is to be part of a community of smart, tech-savvy people who want to be on the forefront of a new literary undertaking.” Hand-in-hand with “literary” is “published,” and weblogs dangle the lure of self-publishing without the stress of outside editors, allowing one’s personal voice to always be on top.

Many filter-style blogs are of political, academic or professional interest and offer the overwhelmed Web surfer a place to get organized in thinking about a topic or area of interest. Blogs fit into the Web’s information ecology system better than anything else so far and deliver the Holy Grail of Web use: pre-surfed, custom-made, interest-targeted logs of the latest thinking. Wanting to know the latest from the best-known has spawned “big bloggers” (Bill Clinton’s Blog, anyone?) with recognizable names (like Virginia Postrel) writing about news, politics, and culture, creating a new communicative genre, participatory journalism.

The freestyle blog, a majority share of the million blogs online, is a personal online journal à la Bridget Jones’ Diary. The freestyle blog has become the most popular and commonly known, is usually hosted on a specific, often commercial, Web site providing a home for the blog, and, crucial to many, offers comments and feedback sections. Best suited to online updates for family and friends, these public outpourings are the popular image of blogs, and so often bottom-of-the-barrel that many non-bloggers think all blogs a messy, undisciplined waste of time. Blog criticism seems to spring from a sense that non-print-media-sanctioned writing is not worthy of attention and lumps blogs in the same category as ephemeral rant.

Not everyone agrees. Editors and creative assistants troll blogs for excellence and are turning more and more bloggers into published writers. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “there’s literary gold in them thar blogs.” “Most writers are not getting published in magazines or literary journals,” says Kate Lee, a young assistant at International Creative Management. She is representing six writers she found via their blogs, and proving that good writing to high standards is to be found in the blogosphere.

Blogging can also bring in bucks, as both professional bloggers and business bloggers have found. Casual bloggers get invitational emails to blog in-house for an organization and executives find that their blogs have the side effect of luring people to their enterprise’s Web site. As a business communication tool, blogs are proving more effective than telephone tag, inter-office email, memos, and promotional mailings. Blogging is a revolution, not only in reading and writing, but also in business, the media, and the privacy-free personal life.

Blogs have moved far beyond the written word and the elegant posting. Photoblogs, “a type of blog that is regularly updated with photos,” and MoBlogs (from “mobile web log”), “the use of a mobile phone or other mobile device to publish content to the World Wide Web,” run a fine line between sharing information and sensationalism for its own sake. MoBlogs, pioneered by textamerica, moved quickly to a trend of publishing embarrassing or sensational pictures on the fly, and are a long way from information- and thought-rich filter-style blogs. The newest twist, AudioBlogs, seems be the first nail in the coffin of true blogging; with no cross-links, no RSS feeds, and little, if any, redeeming content, blogging-by-phone doesn’t even have the benefit of getting people to read. What it does have is a rapid response rate, deemed blogs’ third essential element after personal voice and good links.

Weblog Sociology

Awash in photoblogs, moblogs, and audioblogs, a lot of people still read blogs. Are they the same minority of Americans who read what bloggers call “dead-tree media”? In the report, “Reading at Risk,” released in mid-July 2004, the U.S.-based National Endowment for the Arts tells us that the number of non-reading adults [in the U.S.] increased by more than 17 million between 1992 and 2002. Could a good number of them be reading exclusively online? Could some of them be both reading and writing online, in blogs? The irony of requiring the reading of print media in order to define someone as a reader in the Age of the Internet is heavy.

“Dead-tree media” have long controlled the spread of information and ideas. Displacing this in the latter half of the 20^th century, visual media, such as film and television, became the average person’s knowledge base while print media retreated to the enclave of the elite. Today, blogs in the electronic media appear to be read more than original print versions of just about anything. A study showing how many people read language-based media, print or electronic, might be more relevant to our world today than a study of print-media readers only.

Self-publishing is nothing new, as we can see from the number of vanity presses still in existence. Publishing online, in e-zines, for example, is hoary as well. Weblogs are a new installment in the self-publishing saga, and are far more popular and widely read than any previous vanity publishing. Not only are blogs free of charge and “marxistly” in control of the means of production, but they are also better and faster than print media for keeping up with the latest trends rather than simply the latest news. MIT runs a “weblog diffusion index”, and BlogPulse, powered by Intelliseek, helps via Trend Graphs, Key People and Key Phrases across blogs each day. The same site details the Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics, held as part of the WWW Consortium (W3C)’s 13^th World Wide Web Conference in New York in May, 2004 (keynote speaker: Tim Berners-Lee; presenters: from MIT and other universities and research institutes worldwide). Among the seven “Workshop Bloggers,” three were Japanese holding their sessions in Japanese only, one used French only and one used “mostly English.” For those who want to continue down the international blogging road, Excite Blog directory can help finding blogs in Japanese. Japan is also the site of Microsoft’s first and only Web log service, so look for an explosion of Japanese blogs.

BloggerCon II was a conference about weblogs held April 17, 2004, on the campus of Harvard Law School. BloggerCon I is archived, but BloggerCon II sessions, like Rebecca MacKinnon's on International Blogging, are not yet archived. There is, however, a notes page for MacKinnon's session at Editor: Myself, commented on by Irish Eyes. UC Berkeley Haas School of Business hosted BlogOn 2004 July 22-23, 2004, and the conference was SRO soon after first announcement.

Like any interest group, the blogging world has generated its own jargon, some of which is Internet oldspeak, like “flame” and “link rot,” some of which comes from the person or thing who did it first, like “Fisking” and “MiSTing,” and some that are pertinent to filter-style bloggers (“linguablog”) or to freestylers (“hitnosis”), all in one of the most-often-cited blog glossaries. The folks who bring you the glossary also have a blog that suits many wired people, including the “over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotee” like me. You might try guest-blogging there or elsewhere if you are not ready to start your own. The Guestbar, for example, is exclusively a “guest-edited blog.” “Metablogging” can mean listing up good blogs with comments, or writing a blog about blogs, or blogging as education-central.

Weblog Technology

How can I efficiently search for blogs? How can I “subscribe” to them?

The answer to both these questions lies, for many people, in the blogrolls of the blog-application Web site host that they are using for their own blog, or on which they found a blog they like. For others, blogs are like any other Web page found while idly surfing, something to be clicked on from the browser tool bar “Favorites” button. There are blog search engines, like Technorati, which claims to poll three million weblogs. But for cognoscenti, RSS feeds are the answer to subscribing. RSS stands for (variously) RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary and is a web syndication format or aggregator that grew out of the preparation for the My.Netscape.com function in 1999. It can be seen in the pop-up offer from news sites promising to deliver to you only news on topics that interest you. RSS is elective Web-based content delivery, if you like. Bloglines is one of the most feature-rich of Web-based RSS feeds, for “searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds and blogs.” It is free, via the Internet. For a fee, FeedDemon is an application downloadable to your own desktop that is said to be quite good. There are aggregators that work inside your email program if you like. Search portals like Yahoo! and Google are so fifteen-minutes-ago. RSS feeds save time and frustration.

If one does not use software that automates the process, is one’s output still defined as a blog?

Of course. A blog is, for purists, a collection of links with comments published as a Web page. But a freestyle personal diary, hosted on your own or a public Web site, is still a real weblog. Hybrids of personal journal entries with pictures and lots of links to relevant sites are weblogs, too. And, like books that began as newspaper serials, archived blogs are real blogs as well. And speaking of books, there are a good two dozen available in English, as well as in Japanese, on blogging skills, strategies, and cultural impact.

Blog hosting services, most bloggers’ choice of a blog home, offer RSS syndication capabilities, automatic archiving and a clickable calendar with highlighted dates matching your posts, places for pictures or drawings, feedback/comments sections, sort capabilities for trackbacks, blogrolls (lists of personal blog selections), and many other plug-and-play features. These hosts make blogging quick, easy, fun, and interactive. There is also a world of blogging software for the techno-aristocrat going beyond the scope of this article.

What can I use to blog as I rush from one busy moment to the next?

You can blog every minute, anywhere. Nokia followed Palm-focused blogging with Lifeblog. Not only can you store-and-send photos, videos, and text on/from your mobile device, but you can eliminate the need of your future biographer to employ a researcher. Nokia’s president calls today’s mobile phones “life recorders.” Personal blogging tools for cell phones are gaining cyber shelf space and choosing one means asking yourself exactly what you want to do and where, i.e., do you need desktop downloading or is all mobile? Will you post to a Web page (BuzzNet can help) or email exclusively? Will you collect now and edit later or produce finished blogs on the fly? Think it through, then let your primitive hunter-and-gatherer genes loose on mobile weblogging.

W – E –T Weblogs

Writers can find weblogs at The CyberJournalist List of Blogs or go read William Gibson’s lean, stylish (and archived like an old-fashioned book on a shelf) blog of 2003, or browse Blogarama, featuring multilingual literary interests.

Editors can surf over to Editorsweblog for “Practical issues and real solutions for working editors.” “If you are editing every day, I think you should be writing every day,” and blogs give editors a way to do that, according to Tom Mangan at Prints the Chaff (now defunct but offering a list of editors’ blogs).

Translators can check Naked Translations, {open brackets or Translation Exchange for starters; or answer a call for Blog Translators. Transblawg is a specialized blog, and Blogs, Weblogs and Language and Translation covers many bases. The lawyerly Lawrence Lessig Blog in Japanese and in English can be fun to analyze in a translation class.

These are for SWETers on a busman’s holiday. Off-duty, getting to know fellow SWETers as people is easier from their blogs. Getting to know how other people think about things that interest one is easier after surfing through a few blogs, serious and fluffy. Blogs are even influencing that fifteen-minute work warm-up to get creative juices flowing, as more and more serious writers, editors, and translators give in to reading blogs rather than print books for a pre-job jump-start.

—Kay Vreeland