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Interestingly, my own definition of blogging is not tied to a specific medium. To me, the defining characteristics of the blog are as follows : A collection o
by Typhon 13y ago
Interestingly, my own definition of blogging is not tied to a specific medium.
To me, the defining characteristics of the blog are as follows :
A collection of texts which are :
1 - Published incrementally as they are written, and chronologically organized.
2 - Meant to be read by a wide audience
3 - Usually not ran past an editor.
4 - Not necessarily sharing any common theme
5 - Usually all have the same author.
I cooked up this definition after noticing that the EWDs had been more or less Dijkstra's blog, long before the Web.
PG's essays obviously fall under this definition as well.
- philwelch 13y agoI don't think PG's blogs are chronologically organized in any meaningful fashion. I also think that your definition is too broad, as it would include any self-published book series or maybe even the Bible.
- Typhon 13y agoI originally included "short" as a criterion, but I removed it as subjective. And PG's essays are chronologically organized : the topmost are the most recent.
- philwelch 13y agoAgain that's so vague as to be meaningless--you have to order them somehow and I don't think having a page that lists them in chronological order makes it a blog. At the very least most blogs show the full content of multiple posts on the same page, or have links to previous and next posts. I think the defining feature of a blog that's absent from Graham's essays is that blog posts can be intentionally insubstantial, sometimes containing nothing more than a link, possibly with comments. The least substantial essay Paul Graham has written is probably the one where he clarifies that he's not a racist just because he thinks having a thick accent makes it hard to be a CEO. I don't think he would consider posting intentionally insubstantial content to his list of essays.