What are weblogs?

It seems that my bit of navel gaz­ing about blogs has attracted a lot of atten­tion. Among some of the things that came up, though, is that there is no clear agree­ment as to what blogs are. So in the search for def­i­n­i­tion, I went back to try­ing to fig­ure out what peo­ple mean when they talk about weblogs and whether blogs are indeed journalism.

If you take Dave Winer’s def­i­n­i­tion, you end with a def­i­n­i­tion that is much more lim­ited than think­ing of blogs as jour­nal­is­tic tools. Let’s exam­ine the four basic tenet Winer presents as the basis for a blog:

• A weblog is per­sonal: if that is truly the case, what does this mean for “com­mu­nity weblogs” like Slash­dot and Metafil­ter ? Things they are not dri­ven by a sin­gle per­son, can they truly be called weblogs? And what about the whole trend of com­pa­nies set­ting up weblogs? Doesn’t that go against this concept?
• A weblog is on the Web: It’s pretty much a given (hence the weblog name). But so are web pages? What is the big dif­fer­ence between a Geoc­i­ties per­sonal page and a weblog? Is there any? Is it just the rate of updates?
• A weblog is pub­lished: Does that mean that any CMS tool is a weblog? Does it mean that only cheap or free ones are?
• a weblog is part of com­mu­ni­ties: Once again, the same could be said of any web page grouping.

It seems that there are few answers to be found here. Look­ing for more details, I ended up re-reading Meg’s “what we’re doing when we blog”. In it, Meg talks about the weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary def­i­n­i­tion. Is that it? Does that then make any page of links with a few com­men­taries a weblog? Does that mean that Dmoz a weblog? It has links and com­men­tary on each link. Each of those is cat­e­go­rized in a group? I’m being face­tious here as I don’t think it’s a blog but it does tech­ni­cally fit the description.

Meg does pro­vide a good frame­work for what weblogs are. Based on her extended def­i­n­i­tion, a weblog includes short posts and links, an email address (does that mean I don’t have a blog since I offer a web form instead of an email address?), and is united by com­mon tools that “spit out our var­ied con­tent in the same for­mat — archives, perma­links, time stamps, and date head­ers”. So is that for­mat the basic point of blogs? And is the asser­tion that “Weblogs sim­ply pro­vide the frame­work, as haiku imposes order on words” the core of the weblog revolution?

If so, what is the big deal? There are many for­mats out there and it seems that a par­tic­u­lar writ­ing for­mat does not a rev­o­lu­tion make. And if it is just a new writ­ing style, it can­not pos­si­bly be jour­nal­ism (since jour­nal­ism is a task and not a for­mat) but can be applied to journalism.

Some­how, though, I think that I am miss­ing some­thing here. Oth­er­wise, why would there be so much fas­ci­na­tion about blogs? There is a big­ger story and I can­not put my fin­ger on it. If you can, please con­tact me!