I get annoyed by articles I see telling people “how to blog”, or advising them of “the rules of blogging”, or “what your blog needs to have”.
All of it’s bloggocks. A weblog is whatever you want it to be. Comments, feeds, bloody “blogrolls”, datestamps, none of it matters. Your blog doesn’t matter to anyone but you, so why should the bells and whistles that surround it be important? If you’ve got a little chunk of the web you can call your own, and you want to call it a weblog, go ahead, that’s just fine.
Your weblog can be a bog-standard one on WordPress.com. It can be a wiki. It can be a mailing list. It can be a set of pages hand-coded in Notepad. It can look the way you want it to look, contain what you want it contain, and be updated as often and as with however much content as you see fit.
Nobody owns the web and nobody owns weblogs. Some people like to think they were doing it before you, and some people like to think that they do it better than you, but frankly no-one is judging, no-one really cares, and if you want to have a weblog you can go right ahead. You don’t have to do anything for anyone, nor conform to any standards or rules or behaviours.
The web belongs to everybody, so make your piece of it reflect you. Don’t conform to other people’s rules just because all the other sheep have done so.
Filed under: computers
(27th March 2007)