When Is a Blog a Blog?

At first it was, a blog is a personal journal or space for anyone driven by writing to release their tension or thoughts to the world. But today, because blog publishing engines are crossing the gap between a blog publishing engine and a Content Management System (CMS) by itself…where do we draw the line?

While both are publishing engines per se, CMS are built to be flexible and expandable to do more than publishing. It’s about being able to manage more than webpages. It’s about being able to fit the kitchen sink inside the fridge and the fridge inside your website space. That is the number one reason why many systems become over cluttered in the end but I’ll save that for another time.

By definition, Wikipedia states a blog as:

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

In bold above, a blog must fulfill 2 characteristics. Besides the two requirements, a blog today is defined by other characteristics like:

• The author (not a webmaster)
• The archives
• The layout (a blog layout still has its clear characteristics)
• The popular posts or commenters
• The readers
• And lastly, the library of content is written with a personal tone.

Through my observation, certain characteristics of a blog are no different than your commercial website today. These blog characteristics are:

• The RSS feed
• The email marketing or newsletter
• The advertisements
• The spammers
• The management system
• The privacy (secure area)
• The tags

Based on what I’ve listed above, a blog comes close to a website but can still be defined by the characteristics it (a blog) only carries. In other words, we can’t consider a blog is a blog by noticing it is running on WordPress, MovableType, TextPattern or any other publishing system for that matter.

However, free blog services like Blogger continues to maintain its utmost basic functionality to provide features only required to blog. Come to think of it, now I can understand why they do not want to have Pages like WordPress. Blogger is a true blog publishing engine.

Question of the day:
When is a blog a blog…to you?

[tags]blog characteristics, blog publishing engine, content management system, difference of blog and website[/tags]

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