What Are Blogs?

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What Are Blogs?

When I decided to write about blogs I thought I would use a traditional and simple method of arrangement: what is a blog, where did they come from, what are people doing with them as far as writing instruction goes and then say a bit about what I’ve done with them and why I think they are a promising form of writing pedagogy. But I quickly discovered that people have yet to fully agree on a single definition of a blog. I also discovered an intense amount of hype and gripe. There are those who think the blog will take over the world, and others who think that will be a bad thing. You’ve no doubt heard these arguments before regarding other online phenomenon—that because blogging requires no technical skill and is free, anyone can instantly publish anything and therefore either A) it will democratize information flow, liberate the repressed, illuminate the shady, discredit the liars, and save the world from SARS and terrorists or B) it will fill people’s minds with the sort of un-edited, un-checked, un-educated crap that your average person thinks about stuff he doesn’t really understand going on in places he can’t locate on a map. Like you, I’m guessing, I want neither to leap on this bandwagon nor to snap at its wheels. I just want to figure out what a blog is and how I can use it to help my students learn more about writing. To that end I would like to share my current working definition of a blog, and talk a bit about what I’ve done with them so far and why I think blogging is a good way to teach and talk about writing. I’m actually more interested in hearing your take on blogs than I am in my own, so I won’t ramble on.

For my purposes, a blog is a single authored, regularly updated, minimally edited, publicly viewable website consisting of links and commentary presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs function as content filters. Blogs also encourage and facilitate comments from readers and thus offer the opportunity for interactive communication. When defined in this way, blogs are different from similar forms of online writing. An online diary, for example, would have the same chronology and single author but would tend to focus on the life of the writer rather than on websites of interest to the author and her intended audience.

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