Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Writing on the Internet

Instapundit has remarked on the inability of the media to get stories about blog and blogging right. One of the problems is that they can't tell a blog and a bulletin board apart.

To be fair, the dividing line is a bit grayer than it used to be. Kuro5hin is a discussion forum. It is powered by a codebase called Scoop. DailyKos is a blog. I believe it uses a variant of the same software. Slashdot could be a discussion forum, but it could also be described as a group meta-blog.

The difference between a blog with a large number of comments/commenters and a discussion forum often gets pretty miniscule. There are clear-cut cases of either/or, but there are also gray areas where both apply.

UPDATE: Slashdot is picking up the 58% growth in blog readership story. Some of the comments are interesting and relate to blogging and specifically what defines a blog, others are worthless. As with all Slashdot comments, set the threshold around 3 and rank them by score. You will get the cream without the crap.

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