I regularly read the E-Media Tidbits that are delivered to my Inbox thanks to Poynter. And, today, I just had to hit the comments links to put in my two cents on "What's blogger, not this."
Here's what I said
Lately, I too have been struggling - no obsessing - with the definition of "blog." Although I still can't write a straightforward explanation, what I've come to realize is that there are different ways to look at the meaning of "blogs" "blogging" and "bloggers." There's the act of "blogging," the no-rules-free-as-a-bird-to-write-whatever-you-want-everybody-and-their-dog-is-doing-it-it's-just-an-online-diary-read-my-"blog". Then, there's "blogger" the technology. Which is merely a means to an end. At the KU School of Journalism we have adopted blogger.com's tools to provide our students with a unique opportunity to learn how to become better journalists, without sacrifcing journalistic standards. In the struggle to help journalism students understand the world of online media, we have gone back and forth about how much code is too much code to learn. That's where blogger software came in...we very quickly and easily set it up to provide our students with their own mini-content management systems - without them having to understand databases or scripting languages. We don't consider them bloggers, and I think you would agree that these multimedia reporting students are definitely doing more reporting than blogging.
Leave a comment