I’ve had a few conversations and thoughts about blogging in the last few days: what it is, how it’s changed, what we are getting out of it, and whether being a personal blogger is worth the time and effort it takes.

I’ve been thinking about this since my 2005 presentation at ConvergeSouth. I looked at the blogging landscape then, when Technorati’s Top 100 still mattered, and making lists was all the rage. It was clear, even then, that big brands, group blogs, and upper-income, white, male geeks dominated the conversation space.

Dave Winer was in the audience for the session giving me a bit of grief about my argument. My point was a simple one: the “blogosphere” is just replicating our offline voices, culture, beliefs, and power structures online. I pointed to blogs like BoingBoing and DailyKos as examples of sites that get all the glory, traffic, ad revenue, and media coverage.

Winer’s response: “Well, those aren’t really blogs.”

My counterpoint at the time — and I don’t think I said it out loud, but I sure did think about it a lot and had really did intend to write a post — was “Who decides what is and isn’t a blog?”

This point came up again during a recent conversation with J. We were — or at least I was — lamenting the current condition of ‘blogging’ as we know it. What was a personal publishing platform, a genre of website, and a close(-ish) community of writers and readers has been co-opted by major media corporations and overwhelmed by ad-supported, multiple-author mega blogs.

Or maybe Winer was right: those aren’t blogs. Maybe blogging is inherently about individuals and not about audience, growth, mindshare, or that wackest of wack buzzwords: monetization. How can we reclaim that definition and draw distinctions between ‘blogs’ — content written by an individual, not a staff — and “highly-trafficked web site with opinion and analysis pieces that allow comments?” How can we return ‘blogging’ to to it’s definition of being conversations between individuals and not let it be redefined by corporations and profiteers?

Sort of related

• How to create your own web log/’blog/blog
• This is why, this is why, this is why I Tweet.
• Where Are the Black Tech Bloggers?

Elsewhere

• On whuffie, social capital, and social climbing by Cecily