While something like Gizmodo or Slashdot gets labeled a blog simply because it technically follows the “timed posting” model, I wonder if what separates them from a more traditional blog is personality or voice. For example, CNet features a number of “blogs,” but all seem to fall under the larger editorial umbrella of CNet.com. This is off the top of my head, but perhaps a blog leans more towards traditional media when it loses a more personal editorial voice. Wired has great writers, but they don’t give the same “feel” as a letter from a friend.

You might search my blog for comments on editors for more of my feelings on the issue.

Thanks for reading!

I stumbled across this post as I was looking around for people struggling with defining and categorizing what many people call “blogs.”

Thanks, John for you work in this area. I’m head of strategic planning for a marketing communications firm (www.brodeur.com). I find that understanding what is (and is not) a “blog” is no small task.

The question I’d pose is this: when does a blog become simply the label of a format for what otherwise appears to be mainstream media? Is Gizmodo a blog or simply an electronic magazine. HuffingtonPost? TechCrunch? GigaOm?

I believe they share more points in common with traditional media than with the humble origins of personal web logs. And Gawker? Federated? What about the blog syndicates? They’re looking more and more like Hearst and Gannett.

Best,

Jerry Johnson
http://www.jerrysjuicebar.com

Thanks for the great post! I cited your blog typology in my class construct paper about blog, and it’s really great! I would add more examples of the “network” blogs–Blogs function in MSN instant messanger: you can open the reading limit to only few friends who are in your MSN friend lists. The same is my Taiwaness blog that I can add friends who have the blog’s account and only those friends can read or comment on my blogs.

Therefore, I think network blogs can fit into the four catogories of blogs you mentioned. Maybe I would say it’s just the function that bloggers can decide who can read or who can comment their blogs instead of a new category of blog. This “audience” function exists in the four kinds of blogs too: Different levels of bloggers contribute to the content (individual, group, submission, mixed), and these blogs can dicide who can read and who can comment.

In my paper I try to define what blog is and I argue that if nobody “can” read your blog–although it turns out to be an online private journal–the form is still a blog. I know some people would argue that the essence of blogs is “community”, but blog users use blogs in so many different ways. One of my professor said maybe it’s time to give a new name of the “blog.”

Thanks a lot for this great idea!

Do blogs need to post to the world stage? I think of this almost in terms of the tree falling in the woods: if you post to a blog and no one (except spiders) read it–are you blogging? Or, to take another analogy, is a podcaster who isn’t making an effective use of rss feeds really podcasting?

I like to try to avoid pronouncements of how a technology should be used, because there is no way to predict how users will put a technology to use. These unexpected uses are frequently the innovative sorts of ideas that push towards the “next” technology.

For the past several months we’ve been exploring course blogging, which for me fits somewhere in your taxonomy between a collaborative blog and a network blog. Here, when I talk about a course blog, I’m thinking of blogs that are “locked down” so that only students in the class can post and read content.

While I’ve had a few educational bloggers tell me that “if it isn’t wide open to the public, it isn’t a blog,” I’d argue that the most important benefits of educational blogging begin when there is an audience for student writing, even if that audience is limited to the people in a particular learning community. I think your idea of a network blog fits in with this because it evokes a “connected audience,” an audience that shares a set of friends, experiences, or in the case of course blog, a set of educational interests and goals.

I could see similar benefits in a private “network” blog for a professional community, a research team, a working group, or any other “social network” that wants to blog for a known audience.

So, what do you think, is there a place for blogs that don’t post to the “world stage?” If so, where do they fit in?