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

Dare, I don’t count that as a generic “blog.” When someone says to me “I blogged today” that means I can get to it from the public Internet.

When people do things internally at Microsoft they would tell me “I posted to my internal blog” or “I posted to my private blog.”

So, I guess I’m gonna lose this one if you wanna say those are the same as a regular old blog.

Dare, I don’t count that as a generic “blog.” When someone says to me “I blogged today” that means I can get to it from the public Internet.

When people do things internally at Microsoft they would tell me “I posted to my internal blog” or “I posted to my private blog.”

So, I guess I’m gonna lose this one if you wanna say those are the same as a regular old blog.

“But, I wrote the book and we put that definition in there and no one argued with it when it became the best-selling blogging book. So, too late to argue the definition now.”

hubris? Lets face it, most (if not all) of the comments on this site are against your point of view. When it comes to definitions of words, almost always the majority rules. Why not just make a distinction between “public blog” and “private blog” and call it a day.
It seems that you despair that almost anything can and will be defined as a blog (just as many pro-webdesigners don’t like how 9 year olds who can’t tell black from blue call themselves ‘webdesigners). This is a reasonable fear but i don’t see any way around it.

This is really a silly argument.

There are plenty of intranet blogs that serve the exact same purpase as an external blog, and they are both called “blogs”. It’s not “private” just like not everything that goes on inside a corporation is “private”. It’s just restricted to a particular audience.

Definitions, regardless of who defined them, aren’t static things you know.

Robert- agree with Dare here. Blogs inside corporate firewalls can’t be blogs by your definition. The SharePoint team, and Movable Type, will obviously disagree.

On the Spaces front, I think there is an argument to be made that the private Spaces lessen the quality of the blogging overall, but I wouldn’t argue that Spaces blogs can’t be counted for those reasons. IMHO, your argument should focus on which is the most active blogging platform/community and not the definition of what a blog is.

> Pyra’s Blogger, which complies with all these things.

Blogger allows user to publish to a site via FTP. There’s no guarantee that that site is publicly accessible. I know this because I have a Blogger blog that is not publicly accessible. Oops, I called it a blog. What should I call it? I want to inform Blogger support that their terminology is wrong.

Bah. There’s no official definition of a weblog, and I cringe whenever someone insists that “anything that isn’t X is not a blog.”

If you want to control the definition, make up your own word. Otherwise you’re stuck with the words “blog” and “weblog”, which are gradually being defined by the people of the world, many of whom disagree with you.

“I wrote the book and we put that definition in there and no one argued with it when it became the best-selling blogging book. So, too late to argue the definition now.”

WOW. You should tape yourself saying that and play it back over and over just to hear what an incredible ass you sound like.

Out of the hundreds of millions of people on the internet, how many do you think care about your book?

Why don’t you put up a poll somewhere and ask if things can be a blog if they don’t meet your royal highness’s 5 aspects? Right now it looks like not even any of your own readers agrees with you, I’d place money on you getting taken to the cleaners if this were ever put to a vote.

You are just talking about different things, and that’s OK. Whatever. There are more important things to worry about!

Unless of course, you guys are giving a presentation and claiming you are the BIGGEST BLOG PUBLISHER on the planet. Then , of course, its the most important thing, right?

Oh, and Robert, Amazon already took ‘Plog’!

Totoro – I’m sorry, I didn’t give that presentation.

There’s an old’ish definition up on diarist.net (http://www.diarist.net/guide/blogjournal.shtml) about what a blog is:

“A weblog (sometimes called a blog or a newspage or a filter) is a webpage where a weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) ‘logs’ all the other webpages she finds interesting.”

Scoble- you can try to define METRICS on what makes a *good* blog, a *readable* blog, a *popular* blog… but Mirriam Webster will always be a more authoratative source for the definition:

Blog: Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

Quite a few LiveJournals are friends-only. What’s with the public-access obsession? Friends-only sounds very social to me. It seems like you’re entering a semantics minefield with all the biases of an “A list blogger”. I consider your blog’s layout antiseptic and its participation features weak. But you’re a blog and my active mostly-photos friends-only livejournal isn’t? Sure, fine. Define it however you want. Metrics do matter but I don’t know if all these limitations are useful to understanding the whole blogosphere.

I use the phrase “intlog” to describe any of the internal (private) weblogs running behind the firewall and “weblog” for anything beyond the firewall designed for public consumption.

Its a pain to have an the internal server – but the stuff on the intlogs are private – I don’t want them appearing in Technorati or Google – so the trade off is worth it.

>>What’s with the public-access obsession?

Because a blog is for the Web and only public blogs add value to all of our lives (private blogs add value to only some of our lives).

But, I’m gonna lose this argument.

I’m with DRK, though. I like calling private blogs exactly that. “Private blogs.” That denotes something different from “blogs.”

Robert…I had a chronological diary/log on hanklynch.com back in ’97 or ’98 before trackbacks, permalinks etc were even common, might not have even been around. I didn’t call it a blog, but that’s probably because the word wasn’t invented yet(?) Me thinks this is just to start a ruckas as well.

Robert is simply doing focus group research here. By posting this he is getting more information about what people think and feel than any traditional focus group.

And he doesn’t even have to buy sandwiches and sodas for everyone.

This is a common technique of bloggers, writers, and I guess you could say a 6th thing that ‘blogs’ do these days. The more riled up the commentors get, the better information gathering Robert gets. When people disagree, they talk more.

The specifics of the arguments here don’t really matter, it’s the market research that is the most important.

It seems Robert´s internet celebrity ego has begun to mess with his mind. Please get off your papier maché throne and reconsider your words.

Blogging may be a hot ticket these days, but I believe it´s just a fad, possibly elevated to a higher social realm, but ultimately its impact on the greater scheme of things is minimal. You may wish/desire/hope that blogging becomes even more mainstream and popular, thus increasing your notoriety, but blogs will probably become as common as email in the near future.

2006 is the year blogging became fashionable, and your attempts at creating a separation between “WE the elite” and common folk are futile.

Enjoy the party while it lasts. The novelty will soon wear off and the general public will see blogging for what it is. In the past some people nurtured their paper journals, collecting photos, scraps, scribbling notes and anecdotes. How many do this today apart from probably teenage girls? I predict the same will happen with blogs.

Milk it as much as you can while it lasts Robert. Your obnoxious laughter will soon die down.

I predict an upcoming post.

“How to Lose a Blargument Gracefully.”

In 1999, when blogging first really started to take off, many people made many posts just like this one that tried to define what blogging was, and what it wasn’t. And they all resulted in comment threads just like this. And we all got very upset and it was all very important.

It’s nice to know we’ve come so far since then.