First off, let’s clear something up: a blog is a collection of posts; a blog is not a single post, just like a podcast is not a single MP3 but a series of audio files delivered via a feed...otherwise, it’s just an MP3 and we already have a name for that.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I’ll get on to what my post is supposed to be about. I’ve been a blogger in various capacities since 2005. Admittedly I never really engaged with it: all I was doing was regurgitating the articles I’d been writing for my MSO Media newsletter, Getting Results. However I had a blogger.com account, I was listed in a couple of directories and had one or two comments, so I thought I was doing alright.
Then I closed down MSO Media, moved out of my parents’ house and got myself a flat, during which time I’d setup a new, more casual portfolio site which had a blog filled with thoughts on web development issues and personal reflections. This went along very nicely for a while and, because I was writing about quite well-known topics - and because I had a good grasp of SEO - I found myself attracting a few hits. But it was still not a blog, so if I have to be honest, I reckon I’ve only been blogging properly for about three weeks.
So what had I been doing for the past couple of years? I was writing posts in the right style - even though there really is no such thing any more - and with a good degree of regularity, I’d written my own CMS so I could have full control and I knew how to put an RSS feed together, so what was the problem?
The basic difference between what I had written in the past and what I’m now writing can be found in the word blogosphere. My old ramshackle collection of musings existed almost entirely in their own entity: they could be found through Google, but only as standard web pages. My site wasn’t understood to be a blog because I didn’t realise that the best thing about writing a blog is to be connected with other bloggers: techniques like tagging, pinging and trackbacks were almost totally alien to me, and these are the things that make a blog what it is.
So a blog is not simply a collection of pages in reverse date order, but rather something that exists as a part of an interconnected matrix of searchable and exchangeable content where comment is encouraged and sharing paramount.
Welcome to the real world. Welcome to the blogosphere.
Check out the Wikipedia entry on blogosphere if you’re still curious.