Update: Mike, in my comments, thinks my headline is sensationalistic and says he didn’t say they aren’t blogs. We disagree on what a blog is, which is what this whole post is about so I changed it to say that I said that half of all Live Spaces aren’t blogs.
Mike Torres of the Live Spaces team just said that more than half of all Live Spaces are private. Um, Mike, you DO realize that private Web spaces are NOT blogs, right?
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 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.
So scoble acc. to your definition this is a blog for you
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
but I see it as just a noticeboard which announces things.
This dude is wacked, blog, smog, get a freaking life.
This dude is wacked, blog, smog, get a freaking life.
I dont know if are or aren’t blogs, but several friends have msn spaces just for post pictures …
saludos!
Mario
I dont know if are or aren’t blogs, but several friends have msn spaces just for post pictures …
saludos!
Mario
[...] We got a peek at some cool new Facebook features yesterday and one of them is live today. Each user now can add “notes” to their profile, including text, photos, tags, and comments. Users can also choose one external blog (presumably their own) to syndicate within their notes. And as with all things Facebook, the privacy settings are flexible–you can limit who can see or comment on the notes. As Adam points out, Facebook is dissociating itself from the word “blog” — which is becoming such a loaded term these days! From the FAQ: “Why aren’t notes called blogs?” Answer: “Because then you’d be a blogger. ” Call it what you want to call it; “blog” seems accurate to us. [...]
I tried looking this up in Robert’s book, but it’s not publicly accessible from my house. Therefore, it is not a book.
I tried looking this up in Robert’s book, but it’s not publicly accessible from my house. Therefore, it is not a book.
Ike: there’s one rule to blogging now: don’t dare define what a blog is or we’ll pound your behind and tape you to a tree!
Ike: there’s one rule to blogging now: don’t dare define what a blog is or we’ll pound your behind and tape you to a tree!
Microsoft not the largest blog hoster of them all Scoble says
The annual Microsoft Tech Ed do is on in Auckland at the moment. I've been unable to attend this year, but Richard MacManus went along and dug up some contentious stuff about Microsoft's claims on just how many blogs it is hosting.In his post o…
[...] Over the last week a number of the same people have contacted me to chat about Shel’s open letter to Nick Carr questioning its ‘do as I say not as I do’ undertones and Robert’s post ‘trying to hold bloggers to 5 rules of what is a weblog’. While Shel chose to play the Rosie O Grady card Robert issued a mea culpa card. Based on Shel’s Les Blogs performance and his open letter to Nick he is not someone I would now recommend to people. Which is really a shame given the role Naked Conversations is playing in getting both internal and external conversations going. [...]
[...] Robert Scoble, den famøse Microsoft-”blogger”, bevægede sig for nogle dage siden ud i en meget specifik definition af hvad en “weblog” er. Det afføder en masse diskussion i kommentarerne og på andre sider, og viser endnu engang, at der ikke hersker en bare tilnærmelsesvis fælles opfattelse af, hvad ordet betyder. [...]
[...] There’s been some interesting debate of late surrounding exactly what constitutes a blog. Robert Scoble in particular (here, here and here) seems to have taken offence that a blog can be something that doesn’t look like a blog with a layout from 2002. His main gripe, so it would seem at least, is that a Windows Live Spaces (WLS) Websites/ blogs/ spaces, that are neither updated, or not posted to yet posted to yet are not blogs. Naturally I disagree, they’re still blogs, be it ones that are neither exciting nor likely to gain an audience, but blogs none the less. We do agree on something though, Microsoft isn’t the worlds largest hosted blogging service, and yet we’d disagree on the answer, because the actual answer to who’s the biggest provider of hosted blogs is MySpace. Indeed some in Microsoft would probably agree, Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft notes that Microsoft sees MySpace as their main competitor to WLS. WLS is a blogging platform, and MySpace includes blogging as well. More… Technorati Tags: 9Rules dare obasanjo Duncan Riley Google Jason Calacanis matt cutts MySpace Robert Scoble weblogs inc Windows Live Spaces [...]
Why the Wikipedia Enterprise 2.0 Debate is Irrelevant
The ongoing almost finished debate about the deleted Enterprise 2.0 article in Wikipedia is quite educational, at least for someone like me, who uses Wikipedia a lot but don’t contribute myself. Not that we had that insight originally…
[...] 10- Scoble says half of all Live Spaces aren’t blogs* [...]
So because you decided that you like blogs that have X, Y, and Z, if they don’t have that, they aren’t blogs. Just the way that you decide that if a website doesn’t provide a full text feed, it isn’t worth reading.
You’ve really discovered the fastest way possible to prove that your opinion is worthless; namely, decreeing matters of taste as universal law. You do this all the time.
Working for Microsoft does not give you the right to define the terms for the rest of us. Writing a blogging book that nobody objects to at the time it became a bestseller STILL doesn’t give you the right to define any terms. If every single person at Microsoft agreed that an Apple is an Orange, and if you wrote a bestselling book that defined an Apple as an Orange, and nobody objected to it, that still would not make an Apple an Orange. Your opinions are not adopted into law unless somebody objects.
Get over yourself, Scoble.
So because you decided that you like blogs that have X, Y, and Z, if they don’t have that, they aren’t blogs. Just the way that you decide that if a website doesn’t provide a full text feed, it isn’t worth reading.
You’ve really discovered the fastest way possible to prove that your opinion is worthless; namely, decreeing matters of taste as universal law. You do this all the time.
Working for Microsoft does not give you the right to define the terms for the rest of us. Writing a blogging book that nobody objects to at the time it became a bestseller STILL doesn’t give you the right to define any terms. If every single person at Microsoft agreed that an Apple is an Orange, and if you wrote a bestselling book that defined an Apple as an Orange, and nobody objected to it, that still would not make an Apple an Orange. Your opinions are not adopted into law unless somebody objects.
Get over yourself, Scoble.
Breaking Down the Blog Research: Inaccuracy At Its Best?
[...] while back there was a debate in the blogosphere about what a blog is. Robert Scoble initially said a private blog is not officially a blog. Others [...]
[...] is the definition of a blog? Scoble has thoughts on the [...]
Thanks for the comment and the article. I use Coastal Impressions for all my printing and direct mail. They do a great job.
http://coastalimpressions.com/
Thanks for the comment and the article. I use Coastal Impressions for all my printing and direct mail. They do a great job.
http://coastalimpressions.com/