Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Google's year end post

zmarties [PersonRank 10]

Sunday, December 31, 2006
17 years ago2,734 views

The Google Blog has a post looking back on 2006, and running some numbers.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/year-in-google-blogging.html

Of interest tucked down at the end of the note is the news that comments will soon be enabled for the Google Blog.

zmarties [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Whilst there has been seeming little other comment on this post on the Google Blog, Techcrunch did pick up on it, and turn it into a question – Is a blog really a blog if there are no reader comments?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/31/what-is-the-definition-of-a-blog/

The poll results are currently showing only about 25% think a blog needs comments to be a blog, but there's been lots of lively debate.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

It's an old philosophical discussion: when does a table stop being a table? How much can you remove from its structure before it's clearly something else? (Lots of it depends on context of where "the thing" is located, by the way, independent of the thing's own shape! If the thing's in a museum it might be a sculpture, if it's to the side of a road it may be garbage, and if it's in the middle of the living room it might be a table.) Personally I think there are many blog-like attributes – a subscription feed, a reverse chronological order, permalinked URLs, comments, original writing, the author identifying themselves, an archive, a one-column content layout, trackbacks, the authors getting back to people in a real conversation, no registration needed for reading full articles, posts being non-commercial, etc. – that, with different weight each, add to a blog being "blog-like" on a fuzzy scale of 0-100%. Without comments, a blog may be only 90% "pure", but still comfortably in the range of 70%+ that we consider "blog". But take away some more attributes and it stops being one...

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!