It’s almost been 20 years since I started my first blog. The year was 2006 when I signed up for my first blog on WordPress.com. I had had a personal website since 1998, I had mostly just added random stuff to it that didn’t have any consistent structure or content and as such could certainly not be considered to be a blog by any stretch of the imagination.
So if I don’t consider my personal website to be a blog, what exactly is a blog?
A blog is one of those things that people just seem to know what it is when they see it, but that wasn’t enough for the Harvard Law School. In 2003, when blogs (or weblogs as they were called at the time) were still a new concept, an article was posted to their website that attempted to define what exactly a blog was. While the article is 22 years old, I still think the definition stands.
Technically, what is a weblog?
Now on to the technical features and a definition only a mathematician could love.
A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.
There’s a little more to say. The center of the hierarchy, in some sense, is a sequence of weblog “posts” — explained below — that forms the index of the weblog, that link to all the content in sequence.
A weblog post has three basic attributes: title, link and description. All are optional. Some weblogs only have descriptions. Others always have all three. On my own weblog, Scripting News, all items have descriptions, a few have titles, and most have links, some have several links. Generally, a title cannot contain markup, but the description can.
Most weblog tools require titles. Manila is fairly unique in not requiring them. The tradeoff is simplicity vs flexibility. It’s simpler from a user interface standpoint to require the presence of all three basic attributes, but writers can find this limiting.
If one of the basic attributes is optional it’s the link. In that case the title of the post is often linked to a permalink for the item (see below).
Most weblog posts are short, a paragraph or two. Some weblog tools provide for longer articles or stories, often by including a place for a summary in the form for a weblog post. If available, there should also be an option for only including the summary in the RSS feed for the weblog.
Dave Winer
The article goes a lot more into detail about what a blog actually is and what it consists of. I found this to be interesting because I have kept various blogs using different platforms for so long but never actually took the time to stop and think about what makes a blog a blog rather than just any old other website.
As an interesting side note, the author of the original article, Dave Winer, still writes daily in his blog that he mentions above.
Here is the link to the original article: https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/whatmakesaweblogaweblog
What do you think a blog is? Do you agree with this article? Let me know in the comments below!
