Are we evolving

I noticed several of our group members posted paragraphs about the difference between a website and a blog. I'm going to whittle down to the essence of what many of you have said, which is that the both are ways for people to share information but that the newer "blog" vehicle is more informal and is more conducive to interaction between the blogger/reader and between other bloggers. I totally agree, and think it's due to the fact that blogs evolved from websites.

First came websites, which were created by programmers manually "coding" sites. Then site-building programs came along (like Dreamweaver) to enable more lay users like us to easily create sites. Still, it was a bit of a pain to maintain -- one person was the owner and to make site changes involved getting into the actual code (whether Dreamweaver did it for you or if savvier ones tweaked the existing code themselves). Either way, the only way viewers could interact with the content on some site was to "vote" on a survey question if one existed. That was the limited nature of the interaction until discussion boards came along. Here, people could "post" comments back and forth about a particular topic. To me, a blog is just a discussion board (or my journal) on steroids.

Only difference now is that there are way more ways to bring others into the conversation. As the Youtube video "Blogs in Plain English" mentioned, blogs have enabled everyone to become a reporter and publisher, thus no longer solely reliant on traditional sources of news, but becoming one themselves. What's interesting is that blogs have enabled people to have their own platform to speak about an existing topic....or create their own niche topic. Seems there are way more topics to talk about than there were before. I'm constantly amazed that people have taken the time to create some of the stuff I've seen on the internet.

I'll stop now with a final thought: It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a blog (except maybe the off the shelf template) and a website. Blog-making sites have so many features now that many blogs now almost seem like websites in themselves. And, you have many websites (especially the content-producing ones) trying to find ways to become more like blog communities by adding in viral sharing tools. At some point, they'll meet in the middle and we'll have a new to-be-named vehicle. I'll try to think of a name for it before the end of the course.

By the way, the origin of the word BLOG is essentially, "weB LOG",