Blog : What is it?

Dennis Kennedy highly recommends Michael Conniff’s article ‘What is a Blog?‘ in the Online Journalism Review. Following his read of it, Dennis, one the leaders in lawyer blogs, provided his own definition of a blog.

From a conceptual standpoint Dennis says “A blog is an online newspaper or magazine column without the newspaper or magazine.”

On the technical side from Dennis:

A blog is a form of a website that is produced by easy-to-use content management or ‘blogging’ software that uses templates and is characterized by certain common elements, including one or more of the following: display of content in the form of individual ‘posts,’ reverse chronological entries, RSS feeds, archives, comments and other common features you will observe after looking at a few blogs.

Good sound definitions though what may be missing is that a blog is part of your Internet presence. A blog allows you to engage in the online discussion on, for lack of a better word, the blogospehere. It’s your voice.

You listen to the online discussion via RSS from other blogs and aggregator feeds of keywords and key phrases. You then engage in the discussion via comments on blogs and your own blog.