Blogging: What makes a blog a blog

A blog is often defined as a website.  Just a website.  And in looking at the seemingly endless examples of websites referred to as blogs, this may not be an inaccurate description.  Examples of sites calling themselves blogs range from diary entries, homework posting, logs of the foods people eat, and displays of photographs or other artwork.  Although these sites are undoubtedly ’web logs,’ they lack the act of blogging and are not truly blogs.

Blogging is what makes a blog a blog.  Blogging is interactive, thoughtful, and taps into higher thinking skills like synthesis, analysis, and questioning as opposed to less challenging skills like simple logging or listing.  Blogging is a volley of ideas in which opinions are stated in response to other opinions, and then reformed or reasserted in response to responses.  Blogging allows anyone to become an ameteur journalist seeking the truth behind whatever it is they’re pondering, and yet it goes beyond traditional, static journalism because ’letters to the editor’ are immediately published in the form of comments to a given post. 

Although evidence of blogging is shown only through posting or commenting, the act of reading a blog or other piece of information and silently reflecting on it is the first step to blogging.  I heard it stated that “Blogging starts with reading,” and that is absolutely the truth.

In reading Will Richardson’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, blogging as it’s own form of thinking and writing was clearly illustrated.  Richardson offers a continuum of blogging that mirrors the progression of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  Low level blogging–which really isn’t blogging at all–aligns with the simple knowledge level of Blooms Taxonomy, while higher forms of thinking such as analysis, evaluation, and synthesis are represented in points 7 and 8 of Richardson’s continuum.

What Richardson does even more effectively is in explaining other critical features of the blogging.  One can’t ignore that blogging is an Internet-based activity, and that a post without links out to others’ thoughts and ideas isn’t as high a form of blogging as posting thoughtful writing without links.  Blogging transcends writing essays or commentaries, because it provides for immediate reference checks and the ability to see first-hand what the blogger is referring to.

As blogging evolves, the language around it needs to become more specific.  When visiting a random blog at technorati or blogpulse think about whether the blog is actually a product of blogging, or just another website with a list of information.