"Why the hell am I pursuing this distinction? Because it angers me that so many people, especially journalists, lump people who are publishing small jots of text which consist mainly of a hyperlink and a "check this out" imperative with people who actually publish articles, create sites, and otherwise behave like publishers, or at least Webmasters. In their eyes, we're "all Bloggers" just because we might happen to use Blogger or Typepad to automate some of our content production tasks. We're Webmasters, damn it, not Bloggers, and we share almost nothing in common with the Blogger mob. We know how to use FTP, install software on a server, can code HTML by hand, and resize and debabelize graphics without having to resort to Picasa."What Steve's trying to do here is make a distinction between the content and the software used to publish that content, a distinction I'm not sure is possible. The Wikipedia defines a weblog 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."If you look at his website is reads, looks and feels like a blog. Yes, he writes relatively long posts on a particular topic and there are links to other pages that feature content but I can't tell the difference, particularly since I also tend to write relatively long posts on a particular topic elsewhere.
If you use Blogger or Typepad or whatever software to publish your material as far as I can tell you're a blogger -- and you can be a webmaster too -- they're not two different actions. I'm a blogger (and proud of it by the way) but aren't I also a webmaster given that I've designed my own template here and create a range of different blogs?
You can't divorce the content from the action. Well alright you can -- material that's published in a blog format but was originally intended for another media - such as newspaper articles -- are on shaky ground. But I'd say that if your material is intended to go online and your first port of call is publishing it through blogging software and you're writing it in a style which often addresses the reader directly you're blogging.
I think what Steve's doing is trying to divorce what he does with the likes of livejournal or myspace and other types of personal blogs, with link blogs and photoblogs and news sites such as Cinematical. But I don't think you really can. They're all just different flavours or genres of weblog.
It has been a while since I've read something online and it's got under my fingernails enough for me to disagree with it publically -- and I love Ghost Sites, been a reader for years, but I don't think I ever considered it not being a blog. But if Steve doesn't want to consider himself a blogger, that's fine. It's just the way he uses the word, as though it's a bit dirty, sort of pisses on the rest of us.
3 comments:
Funny, I have the same attitude as that guy only in the other direction. It really bugs me when people who patently aren't bloggers call themselves such when they're just throwing articles on the web with no links or conversation. Blogging is far superior to mere web publishing. In my view.
But it's a big interweb. Plenty of room for everyone.
What a superiority complex. "Mindless nits" and "fur-assed blogging barbarians"? Geez. Maybe there is some mindless content out there, but was it really so much better in the days before tools like Blogger when only a select few (geeks) could publish on the web? In a lot of ways I think blogging is more creative than being a webmaster--it's more focused on content than on the nuts and bolts of HTML, graphics, etc.
Well, I'm glad it's not just me -- and you're right. How many 'sites' are there which look and function brilliantly but in the end have no or very poor content?
Post a Comment