(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.

What are you going to say?

I talked a little bit before about what small business owners should say when they blog. But you know that Tolstoy quote about happy families? “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Small business blogging is kind of the flip side of that: The things you should write about will vary according to you and your business, but the things that you shouldn’t write about are pretty similar.

Most of the blogging best practices truisms for regular folk apply to business bloggers, only more so: Don’t steal content (instead, excerpt and link to the source, and add original thoughts). Don’t be a sockpuppet (posting comments to your own blog using fake names, to make yourself look better). Don’t post while you’re angry or chemically altered.

Looking to business-specific advice, a good primer is the article, “Corporate Blogging: Pitfalls and Guidelines” (it’s all over the place on the Web). It’s geared towards larger companies that need employee blogging policies, though — it’s hard to pull off the good old employee disclaimer (e.g. “I don’t speak for my employer”) when you’re the employer.

A few more business-specific blogging truisms:

* Don’t post trade secrets — yours, or anyone elses.

* Don’t talk trash about your competitors. Just tell the truth about yourself.

That’s the easy stuff. Then things start getting interesting.

Talking About Your Customers — Should You?

What’s your business about? Your customers. That’s where the interesting interactions happen. So how can you talk about your business without talking about your customers? You can’t… but what you can do is avoid violating their privacy (and just as important, their expectations of privacy).

There are some explicit red lines you must not cross. For example, if you’re in the medical field, you can’t reveal Protected Health Information (outlined in HIPAA) — it’s basically stuff you can use to identify specific people: names, full-face photos, etc.

However, there’s a thriving medblogging community out there (including nurses, pharmacists, and yes, even doctors), and they manage to stay out of trouble by anonymizing data, and applying good judgment.

But removing personally identifying information is just one part of it. No matter how much the lingo changes, talking about a patient is still different than talking about a customer. The next part goes to intent and expectations. Say you post an anonymized “dumb customer” story. If you’re posting the story for the sole purpose of mockery, not education, will your other customers think, “What are they going to say about me?”

A good gut-check guideline when writing about a customer (even an anonymized one) is, “How would I feel if the person I’m writing about knew I was writing about them?” Call it sensitivity or self-censorship, but I know it helps temper my own acid pen.

Or flip it around, and let people know you’re going to write about them (”You mind if I mention this in my blog?”); they can express any preferences, they might enjoy the recognition, and they might help you get some word of mouth.

So maybe you leave out customer mockery and tawdry gossip. What’s that leave? Plenty: Trends you’re seeing among customers; challenges and solutions; lessons you’ve learned; customer success stories; and advice of all sorts.

Have you run into problems with your small business blog? How do you blog about your customer interactions? Leave a comment (but only if you feel like it).