The Many Faces of the Blog

Following a line of thought here. After considering just what it was that blogs bring to the table, I got to thinking about the many varied uses people have found for the platform.

Political blogs have an update rate like a news cycle on crack--the big guys here update many, many times a day to keep up with the latest. Blogs displace news in a lot of other areas--such as celebrity gossip, sports, and consumer technology. The ease of updating on a blog facilitates the kind of continual coverage that blogs like these specialize in.

Just because you can update frequently doesn't mean that you have to. Cafe Hayek, one of my favorite economics blogs, updates several times a day, but does not reach nearly the volume of posts of an Instapundit or Boing Boing. The bloggers at the Cafe post thoughts on a few subjects every day, sometimes relevant to current events and sometimes more broad than that. The Vulgar Moralist posts much less than once a day, but writes philosophy essays with a little more thought put into them than your average political blog post.

Travel and photo blogs obviously are more focused on the visual side of things, rather than on writing. The blog simply provides a platform on which the photos can be organized and presented, with varying amounts of additional commentary.

Then of course there is the personal blog. LiveJournal, created months before Blogger, was built precisely to cater to this side of things. These are what get the most flack from people who think all blogging is self-absorbed myopia; teenage girls writing about their new purses or something like that. There's nothing wrong with that--after all, it was a teenage girl like that who ended up covering the military coup in Thailand--but personal blogs can be a lot more than that. In an interview on EconTalk, Friendfeed founder and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit described how he started a blog to keep his family updated on the status of his new born daughter, who had health problems.

People blog their books and short stories.

As I said in the previous post, all of these things could be done without blogs. But blogs have made it so much easier. It's hard to imagine that the sheer volume and variety of content found on blogs today would be out there without a platform that allowed nontechnical users to flood onto the web and share their stuff.