Ten Reasons Why

I think Dave Winer's recent essay on what makes a weblog a weblog misses the mark. Dave both throws his net too broadly, calling "the personalities of the writers com[ing] through" the "essential element" of weblog, and throws the net too narrowly, listing all the possible features of weblog software.

Even more off the mark is the Russ Lipton definition Winer pointed to recently: a weblog is just a web site organized by time. By that definition, the Washington Post website is a weblog.

As far as I'm concerned, the closed definition around (until mine, which is coming in a few paragraphs, I promise!) is from Meg Hourihan in her Raymond Carver-ishly titled O'ReillyNet article, What We're Doing When We Blog. (Of course, I one-upped her on the Carverishness.) Hourihan hits it dead on when she writes, "If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share -- the format."

A weblog is a rhetorical form, as is a a short story or a business letter or newspaper article or, perhaps most pertinently, a diary. The key to defining a weblog is noting what the common components of the form are. Thankfully we have a ready model.

Although many balk at the personal nature of the comparison, a weblog compares to nothing so well as a diary or journal or (duh) a log. All are characterized by discrete, dated entries that are organized sequentially.

A weblog differs from a diary or journal in only one significant way: the medium in which it is delivered. A log written in a paper notebook can never be a weblog; it must be on the web.

So here it is, my very own definition of weblogs (and a damn good one, I think):

A weblog is a collection of discrete, dated* entries that are organized sequentially in time and published to the World Wide Web.

*See the Addendum below for why this is in blue.

The medium of the web generates three other significant ramifications, however I don't believe any of these are defining characteristics. These other components are

• Hypertext links. Certainly this is impossible in a paper journal, but I would argue that linking is not a requirement of the form. Certainly, the web encourages linking -- that's what it's designed to do -- and a weblog without linkage is less likely to be read, but it remains true that you can publish a collection of discrete, dated entries to the web and not link to anything else.

  Users of Blogger, Userland, and Six Apart blogging tools seem less likely to take this approach, but many services like LiveJournal, Diaryland, Xanga, Pitas, et al cater to this approach (and their users may, in fact, outnumber the Blogger, Radio, and Movable Type webloggers).

• Multiple authors. This isn't impossible on paper (literally and metaphorically), however it is impractical. Publishing to the web greatly enables collaborative journalling.
• Comments. Again, something that is possible when keeping a log in a notebook, but is usually never done because of the impracticality of it.

In fact, I could probably reel off several other features of weblogs that are enabled by the web (e.g. search, archives, categories, Last Year On This Date, etc.), but that sort of leads me to the next point: features of weblog software don't define weblogs.

Winer's definition, and to a certain extent Hourihan's as well, get bogged down in defining, or at least describing, weblogs by the features of weblog software. When you look at weblogs as a rhetorical form, the bells and whistles are unimportant. You're looking for the formal components, without which one simply could not conceive of the product being a "weblog."

Here then is a brief list of things that do not define weblogs: titles, time stamps, permalinks, archives, categories, calendars, RSS feeds, Trackback, pings, etc. etc. (basically the last 3/4 of Winer's essay). Those are features of the tools we use to write weblogs, and they add to our experience of weblogs and to the usefulness of weblogs, but they are not requirements of the form. Think about it: would a diary cease to be a diary if it was written in pen instead of pencil, or the entries were not titled?

ADDENDUM: (06/05/03, 5:20pm) I had intended to not publish this post yet because I had some changes I wanted to make to it. But my misstep yesterday (see above) sent it out over RSS.

So here are some thoughts I had last evening after I drafted this:

1. I flipped back and forth over including "dated" in the definition (as in "a collection of dated, discrete" entries). In retrospect, I think it belongs in there. I can't imagine any journal or log that doesn't include dates. The temporal nature of the entry is key to placing it in a context, so I think the date is crucial to the form.

2. Russ Lipton's definition is closer to the mark than I originally gave him credit for. As I wrote this I came to realize that "organization by time" is a crucial component of the weblog form -- it can't be a weblog without organization by time (hence the "dated" comments above). So he's about 1/3 the way there. However, even more crucial are the concepts of discrete entries and, more to the point, organization of those entries sequentially in time. E.g. a newspaper's website is organized by time and the entries are discrete, however they are not sequential -- article #1 in the Post doesn't "come before" article #1. In fact, newspapers are designed to be read non-sequentially.