This may seem like a question with a simple straightforward answer, but as weblogs proliferate and begin to cross the line from personal hobbies to business initiatives, the definition of blog becomes harder to pin down.
Rebecca Blood, an early blogger, refers to the varieties of content you can find as part of a blog. There are the ‘traditional weblogs’ that filter news and information and ‘free-style blogs’ that offer individuals a chance for artistic inspiration. This post was written in 2000 and so she has not included the rise of the professional blogs such as the corporate blog, the journalist blog, or the industry analyst blog. Even the website Typepad, which hosts the Vitamin T blog, has trouble defining blogs resorting to soliciting bloggers to offer their own insights. According to Merriam-Webster a weblog is "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer." Is a blog truly only a blog if it belongs to an individual and not a business?
The one overlapping theme in every blog is the desire to provide information and build a following. Does that make community building the fundamental requirement of blogs? If this is the case, does lack of ability to communicate with the blogger mean that something is no longer a blog? (see Pamela Klores’ posting Community Blogging)
Is something a blog simply because it is offered by a blogging site? Now that there are such household names as MSN, Yahoo!, and Google offering the technology to create a blog is it simply a given that all these newly created weblogs, despite frequency or content or community, are all blogs?
There is not yet one standard set of requirements that leap out to me as absolutely essential in creating a blog, but I do not agree with the idea that something is a blog just because it happens to be posted on a blogging site. What is your definition of a blog?
