Scoble on What Is (Or Isn't) A Blog?

The newest brouhaha about which is the leading blog technology is based on the Microsoft claim reported by Richard Macmanus that they (via Microsoft Live Spaces) host the greatest number of blogs: over 30 million. Whether Microsoft does or does not have 30 million "blogs" leads Robert down a slippery slope, where he tries to define away some -- perhaps a majority -- of those blogs, but I think he fails to convince:

[from Scoble says half of all Live Spaces aren’t blogs*]

In a ThinkWeek paper, accepted by Bill Gates, and discussed with him before MSN even started publishing Spaces (more than two years ago), we (not just me, but MS researchers too) defined blogging as having five things:

1. Easy to do reverse-chronilogical [sic: chronological] content display. Type in a box and hit publish. New stuff goes at the top of the page. Old stuff moves down.
2. Discoverable. Through search engines (I listed Google, Technorati, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others). I specifically mentioned a ping server as infrastructure too, ala Technorati or Weblogs.com. IE, blogs are public. I would go as far as saying that a site that does not ping a pingserver, like weblogs.com, is NOT a blog (private Web sites don’t ping weblogs.com and are NOT discoverable by search engines).
3. Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs. (I can’t be social with private cross-domain spaces).
4. Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
5. Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs. (I can’t do that with private spaces).

So, half of all Live Spaces are NOT blogs. They are something else. How about we make up a name for them? “Plogs.” Not to mention but “blogs” got their name from Pyra’s Blogger, which complies with all these things.

I feel so strongly about this stuff that we put this into our book as a common definition of why Blogging is hot. If your tool or service doesn’t comply with all five of these things it might be very cool (and there might be a LOT of them) but you shouldn’t be able to claim that they are blogs.

This argument is just wrong.

1. Dark blogs -- private blogs not accessible to the wide, wide world -- are still blogs. They are useful, and there will be more and more of them as time passes. We can't redefine "real" blog as just those that are fully public.
2. The metaphor of a blog -- chronological entries, pings, permalinks, categories, RSS feeds, comments, and trackbacks -- do not form an ironclad dogmatic list of absolute requirements. Some or many of these things can be missing, or modified, and the bloggishness of the resulting site is still evident. Is something a blog if it has no trackbacks? Yes. Can you turn off comments? Sure, although it cuts back on the conversation. Are RSS feeds required? No. Can you mess with the chronology? Yes, but everyone gets confused.

   The metaphor of a blog is like the metaphor of a book: it has to be very general and relaxed to cover all the things that we want and need it to embrace. Don't try to tell me that comic books aren't books, or that (as E.M. Forster once did) Kafka's Metamorphosis is not a novel, or that Strumpette needs to reveal her identity, since blogs must be "transparent." Baloney.

   You can't define a blog by a collection of must haves -- the set of necessary minimum requirements -- but instead by the ball-parkishness of bloggishness: it may have this, it may not have that, but it has to have at least a passing resemblance to other things people call blogs. The same sort of fuzziness that underlies tagging is how blogginess is operationally defined in the world: not some authoritative report written by Scoble and countersigned by Bill Gates. It's because people -- collectively -- say they are blogs that they are blogs. The edglings always win.
   

3. It's still a blog if you don't update frequently. It's still a blog if it sits there dead as a stone for a year. It's still a blog until you take it down.
   
4. It's still a blog if all it does is aggregate other posts and mechanically spit them out. Even splogs are blogs -- but I agree they should be pulled out of any tallies of blog count, since they are soulless. But if I create a plaza -- a aggregation of posts on some theme or issue -- and add even the slightest bit of value-add in commentary, ratings, or other social gesture, that is not a splog, and it should be counted. Link blogs, too, are blogs.

So, my take is we are back to counting dark blogs and the various flavors of sinner blogs that don't follow Scoble's Five Commandments. Yes, leave out the real mechanical splogs, but everything else counts.

tags: robert+scoble, microsoft, dark+blogs, sinner+blogs, microsoft+live+spaces, richard+macmanus

Comments

[Richard]

Its not all that complicated, sir.

I have a hammer.
I use it to spread butter my bread.

"Yes, leave out the real mechanical splogs, but everything else counts." wrong. Its still a blog. PERIOD. If we are allowed to make just one rule, why not others?

[nani]

"Not to mention but “blogs” got their name from Pyra’s Blogger, which complies with all these things..."

According to the history of blogging chapter in Warlick's Classroom Blogging:
"Four years later [1998], Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" and Peter Merholz announced that it should be pronounced 'wee-blog', later shortening it to blog, with weblog editors referred to as "bloggers." [p 20]

Pyra didn't release Blogger until 1999, so what is Scoble talking about?