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What is a Blog?

I remember being asked what a blog was in front of a colleague who keeps one. Wanting to keep the explanation short, I said, "It's a kind of online diary with comments and links." My colleague's displeasure at having his oeuvre described as "a diary" was palpable.

The original term from which blog is derived is "weblog", though there is now a trendency to use blog as shorthand. Rich Gordon, a media journalist and blogger in America, trawled a database of leading papers from last week to discover that "weblog" appeared in 45 articles but "blog" appeared in 412. So "weblog", it would seem, is all but dead.

On Guardian Unlimited, we have half a dozen blogs, and are about to add more, most notably our new comment blog (called "Comment is Free", in a nod to the Guardian's distinguished editor, CP Scott).

What has interested me about the reaction from media commentators and writers is that, in some quarters, it is

There is a belief that blogging is in some way different from journalism. "Bloggers" might be the generic term used for anyone with a blog, but blogger and journalist are not mutually exclusive terms. But to their surprise, not all journalists are particularly great at it. As a blog is nothing more than a publishing platform, then it ought to suit them, but the fact that blogging encourages those who can point to other source material for discussion (linking) and adopt a conversational tone which invites other observations means that it is not always for everyone.

New York magazine has just published a list of the 50 most popular blogs in the world. At the top is a blog called Boing Boing, which is a collective effort by some of the sharpest people at the forefront of spreading internet zeitgeist. In some ways Boing Boing serves a traditional journalistic function enacted on the web. But third in the list is Postsecret.com, a blog where people anonymously post their biggest secrets.

Technology and politics still dominate most of the list, and while the American bloggers still rule, the rapid increase in Japanese and even Chinese blogs in the top 50 demonstrates that blogging is a globalised trend.

It is also interesting to note that Nick Denton, who has a string of blogs in the top 50 - including the excellent media blog Gawker and the politically influential Wonkette - is, in fact, British.

There will always be a number of voices on blogs who react violently to the idea that mainstream media organisations can or even should blog at all. Personally, I think that if we fail to engage our journalists with the possibility of blogging, then we are pretty much consigning ourselves to history. This week we ran a post by one of the Guardian's music writers Dorian Lynskey who bravely sat and blogged the Brit Awards for our arts blog "Culture Vulture" live.

It was a great way to use the "latest first" facility of blog publishing and its wit drew praise.

From many of the comments. On Thursday one of our news team, Simon Jeffrey, posted on our news blog about the issues surrounding the publication of Abu Ghraib images - again the facility of the blog enabled him to incorporate wide-ranging links and illustrate the unfolding argument far more comprehensively than would have been possible in print.

So what is a blog? Let's just say it is an opportunity, not a threat.

From The Guardian (Editor's week by Emily Bell - February 18, 2006)

b) 'No Messages on This Server,' and Other Lessons of Our Time

I do not own a BlackBerry or a pager. I don't chat or instant-message or text-message. My cellphone could connect to the Web if I let it, but I don't. I don't gamble on the Internet nor do I game on it (or on any other electronic device). And yet I'm starting to twitch.

I have three everyday telephone numbers, not counting Skype and a calling card, and two fax numbers. I have six working e-mail addresses, as well as

A few no longer in use. A couple of weeks ago I started writing a blog for The Times. Part of my job, as a blogger, is to read and approve the publication of readers' comments. That is the equivalent of another form of e-mail. There are probably half a dozen Really Simple Syndication tools on my computer, and one or another of them is always unfurling the latest ribbon of news in the background. It is astonishing how old the morning's headlines seem by evening.

Back in the dial-up days, computer users made brief forays onto a bulletin board or some outpost of the primitive Internet, all the while clocking connection time in order to keep costs down. Going online was like driving a Stanley Steamer — better for scaring horses and wowing the youth than for long-distance hauling. There was always a slightly neurotic edge to it. You could feel the seconds ticking away while nothing happened. But nowadays turning on the computer is synonymous with being online. Who turns the computer off?

It's rarely worth severing that digital link. For some of us, the computer has become less and less a place to work and more and more a place to await messages from the ether, like hopeful spiritualists.

It is a truism of our time that we now have shorter attention spans than ever before. I don't think that is true. What we have now are electronic media that can pulse at the actual rate of human thought. We have the distinct discomfort of seeing our neural pace reflected in the electronic world around us.

From The New York Times (Editorial Observer by Verlyn Klinkenborg - January 29, 2006)

Exercise 1: Answer the following questions (the first 12 are related to text a., the last one to text b.)

1. Explain in a few words what a blog is. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2. Is the number of blogs increasing or decreasing?________________________________________

3. Which is the most frequent:

word: blog or weblog?

4. Why are not all journalists at ease with blogs?

5. Which tone does a blog encourage?

6. Which blog is at the top of the global hits?

7. What do you think the expression "Internet zeitgest" mean?

8. What are the most common issues dealt with in global blogs?

9. How can we say that blogs are a globalised trend?

10. What does the Guardian editor mean when he says that

Not to blog would be consigning themselves to history?

11. In which way the facility of the blog allowed the Guardian journalist Jeffrey to give more information than would have been possible in print?

12. List all the blogs named in the Guardian's article

13. Write a short summary of the New York Times'

extract.________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Text 2Online News. A new genre? The discourse of online newsNews genresEarly online news design has built on conventions developed in print and broadcast, using continuity inform and content to provide a bridge to new genres: the twenty-four-hour or weekly distribution cycleand the physical properties of newspapers have led to the 'news story' format, whereby a typicalnewsworthy event is turned into a narrative ordered by decreasing salience: the so-called 'invertedpyramid' of newspaper article; broadcast language, by contrast, is temporally constrained, whichfavours‘oral presentation’ styles, conversational tone and soundbites; online delivery is based on thecombination of a small screen and a vast storage capacity. Presentation is therefore piecemeal, yetunbounded spatially or temporally. The tension between this atomisation of information into smallchunks and the gathering together of vast resources points to a database model. The structure of online news Online news design ideally achieves a balance between a focus on the minimalist data chunk and a viewinto the store beyond. Content is therefore layered, so that news is presented at several levels of detail.This layering weakens the concept of the ‘news story’ in two ways. - First, it removes the need for a ‘basic level’ of story. The traditional journalist (or subeditor) chooses alevel of detail at which to build a news story depending on topic and perceived salience on the day. Innewspapers, this story level is typically embodied by the news article.

on which headlines, pictures, background, or comment are parasitic. In non-linear text, content is broken down into more finely-grained textual and visual elements, each of which must be self-supporting, and none of which need correspond to the familiar 'news story'.

Second, layering weakens the boundaries between stories. There is less pressure in hypertext to identify discrete news 'events'. News elements are embedded in and linked to wider content. A news topic is no longer developed in a series of static texts emitted at regular intervals with implicit links to other texts. It is developed at a cluster of dynamic, related, hierarchically-structured texts, like overlapping groups of concentric circles (the coverage by the BBC's online news service of the 2006 State of the Union speech by US President Bush illustrate this model).

These news clusters reveal an emergent news genre differing from both print and broadcast: a theme-based group of news objects held

together graphically, overlapping with other such groups, and undergoing progressive updating. Contextualization The fading of the traditional 'news story' does not mean that newsworthy happenings are no longer reported as narratives. Rather, the narratives are becoming shorter (compare the extract from the BBC online news' article "Harry says sorry for Nazi costume" below), and, more importantly, are seen to be parts of much larger and more complex narratives. This trend has bee