19.2: What Is a Blog? or Better, What Is Your Blog?
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Defining blogs is difficult. Typically the first answer one imagines for this question refers to the content of blogs. One might think of blogs as public diaries or perhaps as amateur journalism or political, op-ed websites or maybe as celebrity gossip sites. The term web log or weblog (shortened to blog) is generally attributed to Jorn Barger in 1997. Barger had been a long time contributor to early net communities like newsgroups and e-mail lists and decided to create his weblog Robot Wisdom at this time (Rhodes). The term could be applied retroactively to earlier sites, but 1997 is as good a starting point as any. However, at that time, one needed knowledge of HTML in order to maintain a blog. It wasn’t until 1999 that the first blogging application, Blogger, was created by Pyra Labs (Blogger is now owned by Google), which enabled a far larger group of people to begin blogging. Still, at this time, blogging was undertaken by a small number of mostly “techie” individuals, who wrote primarily to share information about the web. The events of September 11th, 2001 and the subsequent military actions led to an explosion of political blogging, mostly with conservative viewpoints (“Blog”). Today, political blogs on both sides of the aisle remain popular. However, many of the most popular blogs deal with specific interests from computers and automobiles to (allegedly) funny pictures of cats. The world of blogging has exploded this decade. Technorati.com, a site devoted to indexing blogs, has recorded 133 million blogs since 2002 representing an immense variety of interests and perspectives about what a blog can or should be.
A Sampling of Popular Blogs
According to Technorati.com, below are the top 25 blogs as of June 2010. As you will see, many deal with current events with either a liberal or conservative slant. Many others are focused on technology or entertainment. I am not suggesting that your blog needs to be or should be like any of these. However, they do represent some of the most successful blogging ventures and thus reveal something of how blogs can function. At Technorati, you can search for blogs in the specific subject areas that interest you.
1. The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
News and editorial with a liberal perspective.
2. Mashable!
http://mashable.com
Social media and technology news.
3. TechCrunch
http://www.techcrunch.com
Technology business news.
4. Gizmodo
http://www.gizmodo.com
Technology reviews and news.
5. Engadget
http://www.engadget.com
Technology reviews and news.
6. Boing Boing
http://www.boingboing.net
A blog of “cultural curiosities and interesting technologies.”
7. Gawker
http://www.gawker.com
New York news and gossip
8. The Corner on National Review …
http://corner.nationalreview.com
Blog for the conservative new magazine.
9. TMZ.com
http://www.tmz.com
Celebrity gossip.
10. Hot Air
http://hotair.com
Conservative news blog.
11. The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com
News aggregator and liberal commentary.
12. The Daily Dish
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
Blog of conservative pundit, Andrew Sullivan.
13. Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org
Current events from a liberal perspective.
14. ReadWriteWeb
http://www.readwriteweb.com
Technology news.
15. The Official Google Blog
http://googleblog.blogspot.com
Google’s blog.
16. Kotaku
http://www.kotaku.com
Video-gaming blog.
17. Vulture
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment
Entertainment and popular culture.
18. Jezebel
http://jezebel.com
Celebrity gossip and fashion.
19. The Onion
http://theonion.com
Comedy and news.
20. ArtsBeat
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
Popular culture.
21. Business Insider
http://www.businessinsider.com
Business and economics.
22. Political Punch
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch
ABC White House Correspondent Jake Tapper.
23. Mediaite
http://www.mediaite.com
Politics and news in the media industry.
24. RedState
http://www.redstate.com
Conservative editorial blog.
25. TPMMuckraker
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com
Conservative editorial blog.
Instead of a definition based on content, you might attempt to provide a technical definition of a blog. While one might create and maintain a blog using only HTML, like a traditional web page, most blogs today operate on a web application (e.g., Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, etc.). With such blogs, individual entries are saved in a database and those entries are then called up and published on the blog according to any criteria included in the database fields. For instance, you can publish entries chronologically, which is the convention for blogs. However, you could also publish them by category (also common on blogs) or by author (if there are multiple authors for the blog) or even alphabetically by title (which is certainly less common on blogs). Blogging applications make adding content to the web fairly easy, which is one reason why there are so many blogs. Perhaps because adding a blog post is easy, blogs originated with writers posting informal, daily observations about interesting websites. Informality remains a common trait of blogging style, though certainly there are blogs with very formal prose as well.
Arguably, the practice of blogging has become so vast, including people from around the world, that any definition general enough to include everyone would be of little use in helping a new blogger in a composition course decide what to do. Instead, it is necessary to begin with identifying a narrower genre of blogging practices. In a sense, this is much like the more general advice I give to my composition students about writing. It isn’t particularly useful to try to understand “how to write” in a general way. Instead, you need to learn how to identify the particular writing practices at work in the specific writing situations that you face as a writer. That is, students in a literature course face different writing tasks from those in economics courses or biology courses, and writers in public relations firms face different tasks from technical writers in the computer industry or analysts at a bank. However, any writer might begin with some fairly basic rhetorical questions:
1. Who is my audience? What do they expect from me? What do
they already know about the subject of the text I am composing?
How will they react to my message?
2. What is my purpose? What is the exigency for this text? (i.e.
what has motivated me to write this text?) What do I hope to
achieve?
3. What is the genre in which I am writing? What are its conventions?
(e.g., fairy tales being “Once upon a time . . . :” what are
the familiar practices of this genre?) How are arguments made
in this genre? What types of evidence will be found convincing?
These questions certainly apply to blogging. So when we ask “what is a blog?” the answer is shaped by who we wish to write to, what our purpose(s) might be, and how others with similar audiences and purposes already practice blogging. I know that when I began blogging, I didn’t have a very strong idea of what my blog would be like. I knew that I would write about my professional-academic interests and experiences (as opposed to personal experiences or hobbies or pop culture). I also came to my decision to start blogging after having read the blogs of several colleagues, so I had some idea of what others with similar interests were doing. Most of all, I was already familiar with my intended audience (though, of course, on the public web, you never really control who reads what you write). I knew what other English professors and graduate students were like. I knew about their expectations for scholarly writing. That said, no one knew what academic blogging should be like, and arguably we still don’t know for sure. So blogging was an experiment, an exploration into what that genre could do for me and other rhetoricians.
The specifics of my experience starting out as a blogger are likely quite different from what yours will be. However, there are some key commonalities that relate to the formation of intrinsic motivation. First was my sense of autonomy. As Daniel Pink points out, autonomy might be divided into four elements: task, technique, time, and team (94). I set myself the task of writing a blog and what the subject matter of my blog would be. I established my own technique: I decided I would write in a quasi-academic style. I wrote my posts when I wanted, and I decided to write an individual blog, though many others write blogs as a team and you might as well. As a blogger, you will have a similar autonomy over these decisions and the freedom to change as you see fit. Second was my engagement and desire to improve. The experience of autonomy when combined with a challenging task can create the optimal experience the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi terms “flow” (4). The trick in creating a flow state is to set a task that is neither so hard as to create frustration or anxiety or so easy as to be boring. As such, it is essential that you discover a subject for your blog that truly engages you. Perhaps you might set goals of writing longer or more often or engaging more readers. Finally, as you develop as a blogger you will hopefully connect with a clear sense of a larger social or professional purpose. In the end, it is your autonomous pursuit of your own improvement as a blogger in service of this larger purpose that will help you to uncover your own intrinsic motivation. And maybe, in the end, it will be writing that interests you after all, or maybe writing will only be one small means toward a different purpose. Either way, the experience of blogging will have helped you to uncover something that really matters to you.