In this post, I summarize my thoughts about the state of the art in the blogging universe, as I encountered it at the Jupiter Weblog Business Strategies conference that I'm attending. I will keep updating it for a few days as I have time to think about it.

What is a blog?

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a common definition. There are lots of people who say they have a definition, but unfortunately, those definitions don't match. The commonalities I hear are these:

• Blogs are personal writings and reflect the personality of the author. Attribution of a blog post to its author is a must.
• Blogs grow mostly through additional posts (not by extending existing posts). Individual blog posts have a (potentially) infinite life time. Individual blog posts carry a time stamp.
• Blogs are very easy to create, and very easy to read.

I don't hear agreement on the following:

• Do blog posts have to be in reverse chronological order? Most people seem to think so, but many also argue that there should be multiple views on the same set of blog posts in a blog, of which the reverse chronological one is just a very common one. (I concur that multiple views on data is almost always a good thing, and certainly for blogs)
• Is Slashdot a blog? It has many of a blog's characteristics, but might not have all that are essential? Some people think it is a blog as it allows individual contribution of individual blog posts, but some people are violently opposed as they feel Slashdot is Slashdot and not the expression, or reflection of an individual. In fact, Slashdot does not assume that you regularly try read it in a view that collects, and shows, all posts of a certain author, for example. (Always-On Network does not either, but I think Tony Perkins is moving in this direction).
• Some people argue that Blogs must be heavily linked to other blogs and other information on the web. They consider this a elemental requirement. On the other hand, if so, things like a photo-blog would not actually be a blog: if all that is posted are pictures, linking is really not quite possible, and that would disqualify a photo blog from being a blog. Most mobile blogs (given that creating hyperlinks is not quite something one wants to do on a mobile phone) would not qualify either. Personally, I think linking is generally good practice on the web, but not a distinguishing requirement for a blog.

Real-world experiences with business blogs

There are very few real-world examples of successful uses of blogs in a business context at this time. However, there are very promising beginnings: would you have ever thought that the US states of Connecticut and Utahs handed out blogging tools to their employees? There are several large companies that have licensed blogging tools. I suspect a year from now, real success stories will be broadly available, which makes this a very good time for leading companies to seriously look at how to use blogs in an enterprise context.

Culture-crossing blogs?

I wonder whether there are many blogs that reference each other across cultural boundaries. I'm not talking about references from the US to Joi Ito's blog in Japan. But, say, from a guy in Silicon Valley to a farmer in France? If not, why not? And if so, what does this say about the "connectedness" of blog space and the uniformity (or lack thereof) of its users' requirements? Could it be that other cultures, or subcultures, or applications of blogs just have very different views on blogging and what constitutes a blog?

Can a thermometer have a blog?

This is a slight tongue-in-cheek question, but it might shed some light on the question of what are the essentials of blog-ness. Assume I have a thermometer, and once every hour, it talks to a blogging website and posts the current temperature, like this:

08:00am, posted by Your Friendly Backyard Thermometer
The current temperature in the whole family's favorite backyard is 72 deg F.

Is or isn't that a blog? My thermometer's blog? I think it has many of the typical characteristics of a blog, and one can come down on either side of whether this is a blog or not. It could even have an RSS feed, so one could do content syndication (say, the backyard and the front yard temperature, plus the blog of the local weather channel if it had one) and other nifty things. Personally, I'd say this is a blog and we just need to open our minds a bit towards the many, potentially wonderful new applications that this new blogging universe might have in many places we had not checked before. Like thermometers in the back yard!