A blog without comments is a Personal Web site
August 27, 2007 //
[Update] Thanks to Gerry Hanratty I can see that Mike Arrington agrees with my definition of a blog.
I was first prompted to write this post when one of Segala’s Certified Partners directed me to their ‘blog’. I can’t remember why, I think it was regarding the design and it was asking us to review it for accessibility standards compliance.
I was bemused when I was unable to converse with the author by leaving a comment. It wasn’t the first time I witnessed this, but it was the first time it (almost) frustrated me. All I could think of was ‘why?’ Why not just call it a Personal Web site?!
A few weeks later a Microsoft colleague directed me to the same agency’s white paper on Web 2.0 as he found it very interesting. So, here’s an agency that clearly understands Web 2.0 but yet, wasn’t sure whether to enable comments on its ‘blog’ or not. I was delighted to see comments later enabled as a direct result of my personal feedback on the subject though.
Personal Web sites have been around for a very long time. Running commentary on subjects such as movies and sport isn’t a good enough reason to call your Web site a blog.
A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) or sexual topics (Adult blog), and are part of a wider network of social media.
The bit that interests me most is, “The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.”
Calling a Web site which allows two-way conversations a blog, is a way of benchmarking time, technology and/or techniques. The very same can be said for Web 2.0. Although, Web 2.0 principles have been around longer than the term itself, Web 2.0 enables us to talk about the same stuff, well, sort of. Most of the confusion in my opinion, appears to be around whether people are talking about technology or marketing.
One could argue that if your comment is worthy enough, it should in fact warrant its own post on your own blog, thereby mitigating the need for comments in the first place. However, this is a cop out and doesn’t counter my argument to use the term ‘blog’ when referring to Web sites that enable comments from readers.
Sethi Godin, Dave Winer and Russell Beattie are just 3 people who call their Personal Web sites blogs. Perhaps people like Winer can get away with it as people are very likely to write posts on their own blogs and then link back to his original article.
Perhaps a few people should be given a ‘get out of jail free’ card? Can they get away with being an exception to the rule?
For me, ‘blog’s without comments is just evil 99.9% of the time. There must be a very good reason not to have comments on a full time basis.
natalie says 
Tim says 
Tony Eldridge says 
I don’t know what a blog is, but I know one when I see one.
For me Comments is not a requirement, but an RSS/Atom feed is. And I can well understand why people turn off comments when dealing with spam and moderation can be a huge and unwelcome extra workload.
I also think that Blog Comments are a really bad way to have conversations because it’s typically so hard to follow up and see what other people have said about your comment.
August 28th, 2007
@Julian, I appreciate people who turn off comments due to SPAM, but there are ways of combating that.
Comments aren’t difficult to follow if the blog enables the same type of functionality as we do here. You should receive an email whenever someone leaves a comment after you (that is of course, unless it has been removed or not working right now)
Why do you think RSS should be a requirement? Would subscription by email be sufficient? There are still so many people who don’t know what RSS is.
August 28th, 2007
Does it really matter? A person’s web presence is entirely their affair and not something I’d chose to opine on. FWIW - Winer does have a comment site. I’ve pretty much canned email. RSS is much easier and faster to consume. The fact that few people use it is neither here not there.
Where blog comments are implemented, it’s much easier to follow threaded comments rather than a river of stuff. IMO.
Interestingly, my RSS traffic outstrips my page view traffic but then I do publish a full feed on my own site - many don’t. Like ZDN - drives me nuts.
August 28th, 2007
*If* a blog has “email with replies” then you can follow up. But it’s rare. Isn’t it? On a good day (or a bad one) my morning catch up might involve leaving 10 comments on 10 different blogs. I hardly ever go back to see if anyone replied. And within half an hour I will have forgotten where I posted anyway. So the point is that there’s no good way to track all the conversations you’re having on all the de-centralised websites out there. And this really comes back to the lack of good solutions for Few-To-Few group discussions. Doing it via distributed blog posts doesn’t work. Doing it in the comments sections of multiple blogs doesn’t work. Doing it via Twitter posts isn’t great. Mailing lists are old school. IRC has no history. and so on, and so on.
I have a UK Political Blog aggregator. (voidstar.com/ukpoliblog) with getting on for 1000 blogs on it now. It’s surprising just how many old school political sites have added a “blog” facility but without RSS. I suspect it’s because they paid a design house to build the site 5 years ago and then the design house disappeared! The same goes for the “blogs” on some of the big Media sites. They followed the Guardian’s lead and introduced “Blogs” from their celebrity journalists. But without RSS or comments or indeed any way of responding.
August 28th, 2007
@Dennis - I don’t suppose it matters that much. I’m in favour of using correct terminology as it otherwise confuses people. For me, blogs are used as the main implementation of Web 2.0. When explaining the art of conversation using Web 2.0 principles/technology to marketeers, it’s important (to me) that they don’t get confused by listening to someone else who doesn’t believe in two-way conversation on what they call a blog. That’s just confusing in my opinion.
@Julian - you’re probably right. We wrote a post about how to retain your readership by enabling granular syndication. You can get updates to our blog based on comments, author, topics or the entire blog by RSS. You can also subscribe to the global feed and comments by email. Isn’t it much nicer for us to notify you about someone leaving a comment after you? I think it’s vital as commentators like to comment on each others opinion and not just that of the original author.
August 28th, 2007
I remember reading something similar on Techcrunch before, Michael Arrington wrote “I believe the term “blog” means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume.” I’d have to agree with that.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/31/what-is-the-definition-of-a-blog/
August 28th, 2007
Thanks for the link Gerry, I thought of it highly enough to update the actual post.
August 28th, 2007
I’d have to agree on the comments requirement. As does Jeff Atwood in his Thirteen Blog Cliches, it comes in at #13. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000834.html
I assume the reason for blogs becoming so popular is that the software is very easy for people to throw up something - and that can be read two ways - so they do. You just have to click randomly through blogger etc. to see how many people have 1 and 2 post blogs.
October 4th, 2007
I think blog should be something like a personal online diary and comments by other users are optional.
November 15th, 2007
@aces - isn’t that called a Web site? Why didn’t have the term blog during the early/mid 90’s when people had ‘personal journals’ online, so why invent a term to represent something new if it’s not in fact new?
November 15th, 2007
Quite true. Without comments the author is posting news without debate, with comments we have ourselves a blog
December 9th, 2007