One of my colleagues was trying to measure blogs (how many, how often, etc.) and i warned her that she had to first develop a concrete definition of a blog because i didn’t know of any. Apparently, last week, Jill Walker proposed a definition of a blog for Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Also, read Andrew O Baoill’s response. His response is particularly interesting because he argues that blogs always exist in a community context. Thus, blogs are not simply about the production of information, but the role of the reader.
Definition follow-up
Zephoria has picked up on my response to Jill Walker’s definition of the weblog. She claims that I argue “that blogs always exist in a community context”. That’s not strictly true – I believe that there are several separate concepts that are conflated …
Based on Andrew’s trackback, perhaps i misread him. What interests me about blogs is that for the most part, we present ourselves to a context of people, of expected readers (not perhaps actual ones). That “community” shapes what we write. Blogs rarely exist without the notion of readership.