Tuesday, January 21, 2003

The Blog Defined

The nominees for the Third Annual Weblog Awards, a.k.a. the Bloggies, have been announced. In doing so, Nicolai Nolan, the coordinator and benevolent dictator of the bloggies by sheer virtue of having run with the ball when he realized he had it, makes an interesting stipulative definition:

For this contest, a "weblog" is a page with dated entries that has a purpose (in whole or in part) of linking to other sites. For instance, sites that are intended to be just personal journals or site news pages are not eligible.

By these narrow standards, this site clings to its blogginess only tenuously. Much of my links are internal; perhaps what we have here is more hybrid, as are most of the more literate blogs, like brokentype or William Gibson's blog.

I note that Nolan defines two categories, one by its intention (subject matter), the other by its approach or implementation (has a purpose in linking to other sites); it is certainly possible to imagine a personal journal which has a purpose in linking to other sites, I think; the two are not mutually exclusive, but complimentary. But it nonetheless makes sense to me that in order to recognize the best of something, that something has to be defined. How can you decide which is the better blog if you don't have a clear sense of what you mean by blog in the first place?

posted by boyhowdy | 11:37 PM |

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