What a Blog Actually Is — and Why the Definition Keeps Changing

Somewhere around 2012 I started calling everything online a "blog" because the term had expanded to the point where it was easier to use it loosely than to explain the distinctions. That looseness made practical conversation easier and obscured some actually interesting questions about what the format is for and what it does well.

Where the definition started

A weblog was originally a log of the web — a curated list of links with brief commentary, kept in reverse chronological order. The personal diary version came later, followed by the specialist content blog, the news commentary blog, the photo blog, the video blog, and eventually the corporate content hub that calls itself a blog because it publishes timestamped posts. These are genuinely different things using the same word.

The original format was about curation and linking. Someone interesting was reading the internet for you and highlighting the pieces worth your attention. That function still exists, but it's been so diluted by the expansion of the term that most people don't think of link blogs as blogs at all anymore.

What technological change actually did

Each wave of technology that made new content types publishable — affordable digital cameras, cheap broadband, mobile phones with decent cameras — expanded what could go in a blog post. A digital camera in 2004 meant photo blogging became accessible to people outside professional photography. Camera phones meant mobile video became possible. Corporate content management systems meant companies could maintain blogs without developers.

Each expansion was genuinely additive — more types of people could participate, more types of content could find an audience. But it also made the category less coherent. A daily text diary kept by a teenager, a twice-monthly photo essay by a landscape photographer, and a company's weekly product announcements are all "blogs" in contemporary usage, and they share almost nothing except the reverse-chronological post structure.

Why the instability matters

When a term covers too much, it starts to give bad advice. "Start a blog" means something very different depending on which kind of blog you mean, and the advice that applies to one type actively misleads someone trying to build another. The guidance for building a personal diary blog — write consistently, develop your voice, don't worry about audience early — is directly at odds with the guidance for a corporate content blog, where audience targeting and SEO are the primary concerns from day one.

A content planning tool that works for a personal blogger's loose editorial schedule is completely insufficient for a content marketing operation, and vice versa. Getting clear on which kind of blog you're actually building matters more than most introductory guides suggest.

What I'd skip

I'd skip getting attached to any fixed definition of what a blog should look like or how it should work. The format has been flexible since its origin, and the most interesting things happening in it have always come from people who ignored the received definition and tried something that didn't fit neatly into the category.

I'd also skip treating photo blogs or video blogs as lesser versions of the real thing. The text-centric definition of blogging is historical, not prescient. Some of the most valuable ongoing documentation of contemporary life is happening in formats that didn't exist when the term was coined.

The honest bottom line: "blog" is now a category broad enough to contain almost any regularly updated web publication, and that breadth is more useful than a narrow definition. Understanding which specific type you're building — and looking for advice specific to that type rather than the generic kind — will save you significant frustration.