Scoble, That's Not what Naked Conversations Said...

Scoble gets into more blogging tussles than I do.  He's also a lot more gracious about it than I am in most cases. The current one is about the definition of a blog began here and seemingly will end here.

While it may be resolved in the blog battles, I think I should clear up what Naked Conversations did or did not say regarding the definition of a blog.

In Chapter 2, we said a blog is

"...nothing more than a website with content displayed in reverse-chronological order. New items, or “posts” are at the top of the page. Except for team-written corporate and collaborative blogs, site visitors can identify the actual person or persons writing them. Blogs are loosely joined to each other by linking. Find one blog, and you can probably spend hours clicking links from blog to blog to blog – many of which talk about ideas and theories and rants on other blogs or on mainstream media (MSM) sites like the New York Times or USA Today."

There is a presumption, but not a requirement in what we wrote, that blogs are public. A few pages later, we got to Blogging's Pillars, to which Scoble made reference in his recent definition wars. He wrote these prior to the book and their were five.  In the book they grew to six and now he has reduced them back to five. In any case, we used them to explain why blogging matters, not to define blogging itself.  I think they do a pretty good job of explaining relevance.

However, in numerous places throughout the book, we recognized private blogs and internal blogs. In our interview with Mena Trott, she told us that a majority of Six Apart blogs were private and password protected. We also talked about nearly interviewing Intel CEO Paul Otellini who has an internal blog that goes to 86,000 employees about once weekly.  When he declined, we accepted as valid his defense that, "after all a private blog is private. We also commented that IBM may have the most internal blogs of any company--which has its own irony since the second option for such kinds of communications would be IBM's Lotusnotes.

In fact, our original Table of Contents had planned an entire chapter on Internal Blogs, until we realized internal bloggers had no desire to cooperate with us.

At no point, do I recall Robert or I ever debating whether non-public blogs were not really blogs.  We didn't even consider it.

Sorry, partner, I just can't join you at the hip on this one.

I've been holding my breath since he used Naked Conversations as a reference to make a point on defining what a blog is. He turned to blogging's five pillars, which for the book he had turned into six pillars.

Comments

[Mike Torres]

"Sorry, partner, I just can't join you at the hip on this one."

Haha. I wish I could hug you.

[shel israel]

Let's call it a virtual hug, Mike.

[Mahesh]

"Sorry, partner, I just can't join you at the hip on this one." Really funny.

Shel, I was thinking what your take on this would be and its interesting (though not surprising) to see your response. Not sure what makes Robert think he is expert enough to define what is a blog. Guess the recent spike in his popularity went to his head. Its been 2 months since he quit Microsoft and his sudden bitterness towards the company (I am refering to his post where he said he wont recommend Vista to anyone till SP1 ships) is shocking.

[Nick Douglas]

Holy hell, Shel, this is even more mind-numbing than the last post. Take off your shirt! DANCE, MONKEY!