Blogging vs. Writing Anywhere Else

Despite having written in a few different online settings, including adding comments to a handful of blogs, I must honestly say that I do not see much of a difference between writing for a blog versus writing for anything else. Certainly a powerful piece of prose or verse is powerful in any format, and it seems to me that as long as blogs are essentially text-based they will remain that way. Admittedly, they don’t have to remain text-based, since there’s nothing preventing someone from blogging via a comic or video. YouTube, in fact, already has a number of vlogs. That said, it’s not as though nobody’s ever made a video before, and though I can see where this can open up a number of doors for something creative, I remain unconvinced that blogging is as much of a revolution as many seem to believe.

The primary difference between blogs and other forms of communication is, of course, its availability and ease of use. As has been stated numerous times in numerous places, any ol’ fool with internet access can set one up, and they’re easy to maintain. In fact, browsing around WordPress I was slightly surprised to find just how easy it was. There are hardly any more steps to posting a blog entry than writing an entry into a journal – just a couple buttons to click, plus maybe a few tags for special formatting. After that, of course, is the opportunity for readers to add their own publicly viewable comments right there in the blog – or, depending on the format, in a link at the end of an entry. That also assumes that a blog has readers, which is far from guaranteed considering that there are about as many blogs on the internet as there are leaves in a jungle, and getting noticed nearly requires a miracle.

On a final note, one difference noted by Meg Hourihan is that “The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.” I need to ask my Arts & Technology professor if this applies to those of us blogging as a class assignment.