Whats a real blog?

I read an interesting post that took a new spin on a question that I've discussed at some length in our How to Blog Course. What is a blog?

We were interested initially (the course has evolved) as teaching blogging as a type of creative writing. For us, it was related to the diary, journal, or confessional but had an episodic or serial structure and most importantly, the writing included elements of audience participation, promotion, and an involvement in the world around us. Our approach to explaining blogs was to create categories saying that there are personal blogs; there are hybrids of personal blogs with either business, advocacy, or non-profit purposes; and there are sites which use blog software as a CMS (content management system) but which aren't blogs at all.

Edward De Leau has a post in his blog Why the whole world is wrong about weblogs in which he makes the distinction between weblogs as a media format and weblogs as the technology or CMS behind a website. He belabors it at some length but his definitions are tight and his cartoons are nice.



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Blog posts, corrections, RSS & Feedburner - How does it work?

I sometimes (often) make mistakes in my blog posts. After I publish them, I notice the errors and I open up the post and fix them. I've often wondered whether after hitting the publish button, will my corrections show up on every instance of my post or not?

For instance, I use feedburner to publish my posts. I've learned that feedburner sends out the posts at the end of the day (maybe Califorinia time). So as long as I make corrections during the day, the errors don't show up in the versions that get emailed out.

But, my posts also get published thru feedburner to countless readers thru RSS. And this blog is also hooked up to blogcatalog.. I just looked at my posts insider blogcatalog and my post from about 15 minutes ago is not yet there. But, once it appears there, if I make a change in the original, will it get fixed there?

I will now run an experiment. I am going to go back to my post of Tuesday May 27th, 2008 and I'll change the ending:
from: Dear reader, what would you do?
to: Dear readers, what would you do? I'm willing to pay for a real answer to this question. Contact me for details.

And I'll see whether the version in blogcatalog changes. Also whether the version in my google reader changes



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John Chow

John Chow.

Thank you John Chow and DatMoney. I thought I would try your trick of riding on John Chow's coat-tails. As you suggested, I have never been to Mr. John Chow's blog but I do hope that this post, about John Chow's blog, will grant me large volumes of interested blog readers. Hopefully, not too disappointed to not be at John Chows blog but instead, to be at the best intermediate level online marketing blog about learning seo on the web.

Well, maybe not the best. One of the best. Thanks again Dat Money for you j chow, i mean john chow test idea.
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Postscript - John Chow turns out to be a real person, or this is a more complete charade than I had imagined. His blog got banned from google. I'm still looking at how to learn to promote my sites better. I'm hoping that the class in blogging will help.



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