I remember, when I was younger, my Grandfather telling me I should write something every day.
“Ho ho”, thought I, “Why would one ever want to do that?”
Well come 2012, since I managed to seprate handwriting from writing, I do want to do that, but considering my Grandfather is, quite understandably (and sensibly) not on the internet, I started to consider the idea of transferring some of my internet based written work to paper.
That’s when the fun started.
And how, to someone of a different generation, does one explain what a blog post is, and the etiquette surrounding them.
Wiktionary sums it up rather well:
Blog (Noun): A website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of an online journal while readers may comment on posts. Most blogs are written in a slightly informal tone (personal journals, news, businesses, etc.) Entries typically appear in reverse chronological order.
Or simply:
A blog is a personal website that is used as an online journal (short for weblog).
But those definitions are largely still unhelpful to a non-techical person – to a layperson would you describe (this blog at least!) as something a bit like your own “letters to the editor page” but with a more informal tone?
But it goes further than that, you see, sure, I can print out a blog post, no problem. I can bind it into a pretty book, I can do lots of things. That’s all very easy.
But I can’t embed a video, I can’t use hyperlinks to reference the news article I’m talking about, or a wikipedia article or a song. Making a blog post into a self-contained article with footnote references and enough context in the article for it to make sense? That’s not quite what I was hoping for.
And what about my video blogs – transferring them to the TV screen, technologically, would be just one step – but how do you explain the difference in the medium? A video blog isn’t a movie, it’s not a bit of TV, it’s not formal, it’s not documentary, it’s not scripted and it’s barely edited – how can you even begin to put that in context?
Now of course, to put it back into perspective, I’m not naive enough to assume that it’s so hard to grasp the idea of my blog content in context, but considering how to transfer things to older forms of media did make me realise their limitations, especially in the context of things I currently take for granted – like hyperlinks!
