Things That Are Not Blogs, But Are Blog-ish

When you get right down to it, blogs are pretty simple — they’re Web pages where the new stuff goes on top. Structurally, that about covers it, though we usually associate a whole bunch of other features and functionality that make blogs, “blogs” — archives, commenting, RSS feeds, blogroll links, the ability to embed multimedia, ease of publishing, and so forth.

(Of course, the existential blog question has to include the norms and behaviors that distinguish blogs from other types of Web pages, but I’ll come back to that.)

Some people use blogs strictly for that ease of publishing — they take certain bloggy bits, and forgo others. As I’ve mentioned, one notable example is Postsecret, which uses Blogger/Blogspot, but doesn’t have comments, or even archives (see more about about Postsecret in my writeup of the “If You Build It, Will They Come?” event).

Now, I usually say that a blog that doesn’t take comments isn’t a blog — it’s merely blog-ish. That doesn’t mean it’s not good, or useful — it’s just different.

And I understand that for high-traffic blogs (like BoingBoing, when they were in their “no commenting” phase), things are a little different — high traffic blogs get a lot more spam, have a lot more cross-conversations, and pick up a lot more idiots who like to troll in front of large audiences. This is where comment moderation (pre-approval or enforcement), becomes more necessary. But the point about having comments is that they signify a willingness to take feedback, and a desire to participate in public conversation.

(Whether you actually do this is an entirely different question.)

Another aspect of people using blogs as a convenient content management/publishing system, are Web pages that started out as blogs, but slowly shift to something more like traditional Web sites. As a recent example, look at the Silicon Alley Insider redesign, which as TechCrunch before it, basically belies its blog infrastructure, and if you didn’t know any better, looks like a traditional magazine Web site. At least from the main page — when you dig a little deeper, you still see a blog.

However, the term “traditional Web site” is becoming pretty meaningless –when non-blog Web sites add bloggy features like RSS or commenting, you get a convergence into a mushy middle where Web pages blend features traditionally seen on blogs, with features previously only seen on non-blog Web sites (photo galleries, automatically generated links to related content, etc).

Anyway, it all goes back to norms and behaviors. I was looking at a newspaper site’s blogs (it might have been the Washington Post), where a commenter opined that the comments associated with stories were basically useless cesspools of people shouting at each other, whereas the comments in the newspaper’s blogs were much more useful. Partly, it may be due to traffic and larger audiences, but in the newspaper example, we still don’t see a lot of reporters and editors responding to and policing their own comments, whereas we do see a lot more of that in blogs.

The point of all this is that a Web site is bloggy if it has a personality; shows a desire to listen, share and communicate; is responsive; and, yeah, those old saws about transparency and authenticity.

So if anyone out there is still hung up on the idea of having or not having a blog, or what is or isn’t a blog — focus on the content, and the behavior that people like about blogs, and the rest will follow. Well, it won’t follow by itself, you have to work at it. But it’s a start.