In a ThinkWeek paper, accepted by Bill Gates, and discussed with him before MSN even started publishing Spaces (more than two years ago), we (not just me, but MS researchers too) defined blogging as having five things:Now.. let's see how many I get right.
1) Easy to do reverse-chronilogical content display. Type in a box and hit publish. New stuff goes at the top of the page. Old stuff moves down.
2) Discoverable. Through search engines (I listed Google, Technorati, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others). I specifically mentioned a ping server as infrastructure too, ala Technorati or Weblogs.com. IE, blogs are public. I would go as far as saying that a site that does not ping a pingserver, like weblogs.com, is NOT a blog (private Web sites don’t ping weblogs.com and are NOT discoverable by search engines).
3) Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs. (I can’t be social with private cross-domain spaces).
4) Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
5) Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
Reverse chronological order? Check
Discoverable in search engines? Err...
Social and trackbacks? Blogger has "backlinks"... apparently. This is too hard.
Permalinkable? Yeah, got that.
Syndicatable? Blogger provides an rss link.
Now, technically I should be able to go to the linked post and post a link back to this post -- I guess thats the "trackback" bit. But from seeing other sites, it seems to be more... automated than that for some sites.
As for discoverable... well, eventually. If you knew what keywords to use. Maybe.
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Shoulder has started aching again, and forearm gone back to numb. Yay. Back to the Doctors. However, since surgery is the option left on the shoulder, I think I'll have to live with it.
