Google Blogoscoped

Friday, May 30, 2003

Blogspace and Blogzoom

Microdoc got me thinking about the different kind of blog approaches, so here are the blog categories I came up with. A single blog can freely mix one or more.

Blog Categories

What do all the blogs have in common? These would be the formal factors of day-to-day communication; permanent links into the archive; and posts ordered in reverse chronological order. But if we focus on the more contentual aspect, we find:

  1. Topic News Blog: Current updates and information on a certain subject.

  2. Personal Blog: A public diary.

  3. Research Blog: Publications of original scientific or other content.

  4. Artistic Blog: Original art creations, such as imagery or poetry.

  5. Antenna Blog: The heavily linked web seismograph.

  6. Essay Blog: Essayistic opinion pieces.

  7. Image Blog: Self-referential news, talking about site changes, blogging for the purpose of blogging.

For example a Google Blog

E.g. this blog would use almost all of above categories:

I would assume that the highest quantity of bloggers falls into the “Personal” category, while the highest quantity of blog-readers would look for “Topic News”. A topic news blog becomes even more interesting when it adds original research (like statistics), as well as essays and artistic content. A “Topic News” blog is more usable in the blogworld if it’s clearly focussed, because then it can be used for a daily read, for RSS feeds connected to other sites, and so on.
A personal blog on the other hand becomes more interesting when it is an Essay blog by a famous person (like William Gibson’s blog).

Blogzooming Topics

Of the “Topic News” blogs, there are a variety of “blogzooms"* one can use:

*There are shades of gray in-between those, but for the sake of a clear argument, I will use above differentiation.

There would be an inverted pyramid shape hierarchy when we analyze the references and scope of subject.
A Blogzoom of level 1 might link to posts of a Blogzoom level 1 and 2 (e.g. “World News - New important scripting language published.”). Blogzoom 2 references to Blogzoom 2 and Blogzoom 3. However, the level 3 Blogzoom would mostly only point to other Blogzoom 3 levels. E.g. if I have a Google blog, I would not publish an item about a new scripting language — and I wouldn’t publish election results for the next US President at any time, no matter how important this is for the world in general. (The simple fact that it would be covered by other Topic News blogs is enough to make it redundant in my own blog.)

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