Krista writes:
In Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, Susan Herring and her group seem to have developed a working schema that classifies blogs as k-logs (knowledge-logs), journals, and filters. Most people seem to work along these lines, and some (like Van Dijck) differentiate between diaries and journals. The thing is, I don’t see my blog in any of those categories. Mine shifts from week to week. This past week, it’s looked more like an k-log than anything else. Last week when I was complaining about my car for days on end, it looked more like a journal. And none of that accounts for the pinups.
The difference between k-logs and journals, the third category that Krista cited, “digital commonplace book,” and other categorizations, are what is at the heart of the WATFB discussion that is due to crop up again any time now.
If a blog researcher came by my site today he or she would find a mish-mash of information filtering and navel-gazing, completely masking the archives of political and theoretical writing exercises I have performed here. Further, I imagine that some time in the future this place will be full of more k-log and political blogging, moving away again from the quiz-taking and picture-posting.
I have always considered blogs to be more like community hubs, information-gathering and -sharing for the like-minded, among whom discussions arise. Though the cateogrizations are needed, they seem awfully confining for such a broad array of topics self-published by complex individuals.