Blogging about blogging

October 4, 2008

I don’t often write about blogging. Seems somewhat circular to do so, but there has been a lot of discussion on the web lately about what blogging really means and what the role is, etc. Having been at it for a bit, and hopefully with some visibility, perhaps I can pen some thoughts down on this subject.

In an age when the definition of a blog and who is a blogger gets more and more cloudy, I still consider myself a blogger, although that word brings back memories of an elegant medium for a more civilized age. To be a blog is just one format for making the voice that all of us have to a degree more public. There are many others, but this is the one that makes the most sense when you want to write about current events, the things you have opinions about and when you want to rave and rant. The chronological format, the ability to comment and have a “conversation” with others makes blogs very convenient in a number of ways.

TIMTOWDI. Every Perl programmer knows what that means. It also applies to pretty much every third thing out there, including blogging. There is no one way to describe blogging, what constitutes a blog, what constitutes a science blog, what the role of a blog should be, etc. For me a blog is very personal, for others it’s a way of communicating with users of a particular piece of code, or publishing news about your products, and increasingly the modern op-ed. You can write about visualization of publications, add additional analysis to a paper, introduce people in your team, or talk about your mission statement. Some bloggers are journalists, and some journalists are bloggers, but we are always trying to talk in generalities when it comes to that subject.

So here is a simple request. Can we stop trying to paint everything in the broadest brushstrokes possible? All you need to be a blogger is the ability (or lack thereof) to write, and an appropriate CMS that allows you to express yourself in the appropriate format. And that’s just one opinion. YMMV

Image from xkcd