I made a statement a few days ago to the fact that:

…no one really understands what the hell the Blogosphere is or can define it.

Well I may have even underestimated just how undefinable the Blogosphere is. If you’ll agree that the Blogosphere is comprised of blogs then one would think a first step of identifying the Blogosphere would be to identify the Blogs it’s comprised of. However, identifying blogs and their usage or purpose isn’t as easy as some would suspect. Robert Scoble of Scobleizer recently tried to define blogs as having five things:

1) Easy to do reverse-chronological content display. Type in a box and hit publish. New stuff goes at the top of the page. Old stuff moves down.
2) Discoverable. Through search engines (I listed Google, Technorati, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others). I specifically mentioned a ping serveras infrastructure too, ala Technorati or Weblogs.com. IE, blogs arepublic. I would go as far as saying that a site that does not ping a ping server, like weblogs.com, is NOT a blog (private Web sites don’t ping weblogs.com and are NOT discoverable by search engines).
3) Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs.(I can’t be social with private cross-domain spaces).
4) Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
5) Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content,which lets me read a lot more blogs. (I can’t do that with privatespaces).

Scoble has caught a lot of heat for trying to define bogs so narrowly and has since agreed that he was wrong for trying to hold bloggers to five rules.

So the question has to be asked, are there any hard and fast definitions for what a blog is? Some such as Stowe Boyd of /Message have stated that

So, my take is we are back to counting dark blogs and the variousflavors of sinner blogs that don’t follow Scoble’s Five Commandments.Yes, leave out the real mechanical splogs, but everything else counts.

If you had to define a short definition that could be used to identifiy what is and what is not a blog, what would it be? Or are you like me and don’t even dare to let your mind go there?


technorati tags:blog, blogging, blogosphere

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, blogosphere