There are a couple of issues to be thought about here. First, figuring out—for the purposes of any other sort of research—what a blog really is. At the AoIR conference last fall, I noticed that most of the people talking about blogs (myself included) either didn’t define blogs, or used a potentially problematic definition. Second, determining whether what we want/need to focus on for meaningful results are the blogs, or the bloggers. I maintain four different blogs, for example—not including the blogs for each of my classes. Choosing to focus on the object produced yields different results from focusing on the producer. Third, deciding how (or whether) to categorize blogs. Reading through the bloggies award page for 2004 (while you’re there, vote for misbehaving for best group blog!), I was struck by many of the categories, and by the assumptions inherent in those categories.

There was a halycon period (between, say, the launch of Blogger and the launch of Gawker) when the definition of a weblog, weblog technology, and the actual interconnected mass of weblogs were all of a piece. When someone asked “What’s a weblog?”, you could point to Instapundit or Talking Points Memo or the recently updated list on blogger and say “There, that’s it, that’s a weblog”, without having to specify whether you meant the technology driving it, or the actual blog itself, or the abstract notion derived from the two. Those days are over. Weblogs (the technology) have become the premier lightweight publishing platform, and make no requirements that the users of that platform respect or even know about weblogs (the communal practice). The only thing in common among Jeremy Hylton, Dave Barry, Howard Dean's campaign, the US Navy's procurement officers and the_d00shbag over at LiveJournal, who just quit his job at KFC, is that they all use weblog software.