Rettberg Chapter 1: Blogging Defined
So I read the first chapter of that book Blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg, which you can buy using that convenient LINK I just made. Linking is, in fact, one of the things discussed in this chapter that helps to define what a blog is.
There was some discussion about a blog being either a genre or a medium. I think I fall more on the medium side of that, especially nowadays when one sees blogging software used for so many different purposes, just because it tends to be so easy. Putting the stamp of genre on a blog seems to indicate that you can predict the content in it based on all the other blogs out there, which doesn’t seem at all accurate. A blog can contain personal thoughts, reviews, essays, short stories, or just about any kind of text content. The structure of a blog is just convenient for the publishing of content to the web, and does not majorly dictate, to me, what you should do with it.
Still, I do also agree that personality seems to have quite a lot to do with how many blogs are put together. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose. I enjoy that it puts a little bit of humanity back into the written word, but it does introduce that problem of needing to gel with the personalities running the thing. I actually read very few blogs now because of that very issue. I rarely ever get mad reading a newspaper, but I have gotten pretty worked up over some blog posts.
As for the different types of blogs (personal, topic, and filter), I’m mainly familiar with the topic blog, because it’s a quick way to get specific information. The diary and filter blogs seem to be primarily driven by an interest in people rather than topic, and since I hate people (or something) I suppose I have less interest in those types.
More to follow shortly!
Tags: #en3177, blogging, genre, medium, rettberg, types
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