Thursday, August 06, 2009

Blogs, Posts, and Comments

Just a quick terminology note.

A "blog" should be distinguished from a "post", and a "post" should be distinguished from a "comment". A post is a separate entry in a web log (i.e., blog), made by the blog's owner or some other contributor (there are group blogs with several contributors and all blogs may invite "guest bloggers"). A blog comment is a response by a reader made to an individual post.

You don't "write a blog", you "maintain a blog" or "post to your blog". You write a post or a comment. (You may post your comment after writing it.)

To say "Jones wrote a blog about it yesterday..." is akin to talking about "the Google" or "the Internets". It's illiterate (about the web). Jones either wrote a blog post or wrote about it on his blog; he did not write a blog on the topic.

2 comments:

  1. What if a writer maintains a blog for an extended period, and then concludes it to move onto other projects? I could see myself saying, "Oh yeah, she wrote a blog back back in the late 90s about that awful temp job she had while she was attending grad school."

    True, I would be more likely to say, "She *kept* a blog" but maybe "wrote" might be used with "blog" in that less common context.

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  2. I could agree to that (though I'd also prefer "kept"). But we wouldn't we say, "She was writing a blog back in the 90s..."?

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