But what am I really?

[andrewducker]

Over here Guy Kewney claims there are important distinctions between journalism, blogging and online diaries. And I think he's right - I just think that there is confusion because the distinctions aren't where people are used to looking.

I write. On some days I write about current events. Other days I post links to things I find amusing. Sometimes I let people know what I'm up to. Frequently I do all of these on the same day, and I do them all in the same place (andyduckerlinks notwithstanding).

The labels of journalism, comment, diary, etc, apply to individual pieces of writing, which in the past would have appeared in different places, organised by type. On the internet they tend to be organised by person, with everything by a particular person in one place. For instance, take the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson - he has an online pulpit from which to speak. And most of the time he's pithily political, but occasionally he includes some personal details - which almost invariably provokes amusement from some people and outrage from others.

I'm sure eventually we'll reach a semantic-web wonderland, where you'll be able to subscribe to just the political posts from a variety of pundits, leaving their amusing stories unread, slicing and dicing the flows of knowledge to extract just what you want. But for now you get to watch an interesting shift, in which things move from being centred around the organisation which pays for the commentary to the people who write it.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

And I'm a journalist who blogs using software designed for online diaries.

Urk.

FX: Simon Explodes.

[andrewducker]

Exactly. The whole "But are you a proper blogger?" thing pisses me off no end. Especially as most people don't seem to have any idea what that might mean. It's like academia or fandom - a minority of people dividing themselves into smaller and smaller groups so that they can feel better about being above someone in the heirarchy.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I would say that I don't keep a blog.

I have an online diary, of sorts. It's not a blog. A blog (these days) in the mainstream usage) is something different.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah, but what is it?

(nice icon, by the way)