The Butt Ugly Weblog

Why I'd like to understand blogging

People ask me often what is a "blog". It annoys me to no end that I cannot give a simple answer, because it tells me how little I understand of the phenomenon.

A big discussion point in Finland at the moment is that "blogs" have been translated as "internet diaries". There is an danger of confusion here: If I tell you that I play go, and that it is an "old chinese boardgame", you will immediately understand its nature. But if I say that "I blog, and it's like writing a diary on the web", your next question will be "do you really write about your sex life in public?" And that is because the word "diary" has a private connotation. Reading someone else's diary is peeping and wrong. Reading things that someone else published in the hopes that someone would read them and give feedback, is not. Diary = private, blog = public.

Most of the significant weblogs in the world are not diaries. But that's another subject for a later day.

Perhaps I am an elitist, purist and academic. But I would still really, really like to be explain to my grandmother what it is that I care so much about.