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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Learning from a blog....

Good listening and learning by a vendor...

I read on a blog about an interesting effort by a vendor to learn about their members and how their services work and can be improved. It was a learning experiment.

And I quote:

The blog - web home schooling - was started by Time4Learning as a learning experiment.We asked half a dozen parents (actually, all moms) of students using Time4Learning to write on this group blog about the details of their homeschooling program. What their days were like and what they worried about. And were happy about.

More specifically, we wanted to know what was working for them and what wasn’t in terms of their use of online educational materials.

--- it continued for awhile and concluded with......

What did we learn? We learned a lot of details and about other products that are used in conjunction with us. We learned that most homeschool curriculums are a home-made eclectic mix optimized for each child. And that there is different mix of planning, routine, and spontenity for each family. We were stunned to find out how unique and useful our service really is. My favorite posts:
The gifted child, with autism, with Time4Learning
How the Internet changes everything….for homeschoolers
T4L - How it helps everyone. Mom too.



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Blogging Software - Todays problems

I have a few problems with the current generation of blogging software. I wonder if my list is very different than most others.

1. Sticky. Most forums allow the moderator to mark a comment or thread "sticky". This means that this posting, even when it's not the most recent, stays at the top. I can't seem to find this feature in the blogger or wordpress, the two blogging systems that I use. I'm about to try Typepad so stay tuned..

2. Subscribe to updates by email. This elusive feature is one that I would really like. The comments section allows users (including the moderator) to get emails about new comments but I'm talking about having a simple subscription method to get emails about all updates to the blog. I gather that RSS would be better system but I don't seem to understand RSS and I'd really like it to be a simple email system. Even the feedburner addition to wordpress and blogger is lacking this.

3. More HTML functionality such as tables in blog posts. While it's cool to be able to post videos and images, I sometimes try to put some info on a blog post that is best done as a table. While I succeeded after laborious efforts, it should be simplified (by the way, I did figure out some of the bugs and workarounds in blogger for tables but I can't seem to find my write-up here. Maybe it's on another blog, maybe it's on a forum. Ask if you want to see it)

4. Integrated trackbacks, stats, and subscriptions. Basically, I like that google bought feedburner and is integrating them. I just want it done already plus, I'd like them to remember us mortal non-techie users and provide us simple emails subscriptions and de-emphasize the glitzy rss feeds that handle everything including podcasts (another technology that I've not yet gotten involved with).

5. Promotion. It would be nice if there was more automated pinging built into the blogs. Or, if there is more than I am aware of, more documentation on them. I tend to update my content and then to manually use:
www.pingomatic.com
www.pingoat.com
www.pingmyblog.com
www.autopinger.com
www.kping.com
But I can't tell if my efforts are useful or wasted. I do know that if I correctly join and participate in the blog communities, I do well.