I have this funny urge to do a taxonomy of blogs. Some of the distinguishing characteristics would be:
- Single author | multiple authors
- Multiple posts per day | multiple days between posts
- Blogger does | does not already have an outlet in traditional media
- Blogger did | did not acquire an outlet in traditional media because of blogging
- Blog(ger) is an appendage of traditional media
- Theme or organizing principle of blog:
~ Politics/public policy
~ Popular culture
~ Career/field of expertise
~ Personal experiences/thoughts (cf. traditional [private] journal/diary)
~ Hobby/hobbyhorse
~ A lark/place to BS - Blog has | does not have advertising
- Blog accepts | does not accept donations
- Blog accepts | does not accept comments
- Blogger responds | does not respond to comments
- Blog has more | fewer comments than posts
- Blog is | is not part of a blog ring
- Apparent motivation of blogger (this will be tricky):
~ Self-marketing
~ Self-display
~ Self-help
~ Self-immolation
~ World-love
~ World-hate
~ World-weariness, escape from
~ World-entente, attempt at
~ Generalized subversion/anarchic acting-out/nose-thumbing
~ Generalized connecting/ad hoc community-building
~ Practice at word structures
~ Ennui
Today I stumbled across two blogs that date back to 2001, and it rather stunned me. Both of them are quite busy blogs, one by a big-shot law professor whom I don’t care to name, the other by an unknown (as far as I know) researcher at a Washington think tank who at one point in his life had pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy. I’d have to do a bit of research to determine when the first blogs started sprouting. I remember testing out some blogging applications several years ago, but didn’t keep them up—in fact, they were never made public. I was just trying to keep up with the technology—part of my motivation was to see if it might be useful at my day job. In the intervening years I’ve spent a great deal of time and spilled many words in the (private) family forum I set up, where, due to the size of the family, my readership is vastly greater than it is here (or so it seems—the response is certainly greater).
So—why did I start blogging? Why am I not among the 97% of humanity that is blogless? Maybe someday I’ll let you all know.
