by Ethan Johnson
August 31, 2006

I'm sure I bore people to tears with this assertion, but I mention that ethmar.com is "not a blog" from time to time because it theoretically helps tear down the "box" that has built up around the weblogging phenomenon. For example, I just added "trackback" functionality to this site yesterday. Aha, trackbacks are a purely "blogging" function, you might say. I say, why "just" blogs?

In the print biz, people often ask for (and sometimes receive) "tear sheets": If someone is mentioned in an article, or even better, is the subject of an article, that person may ask for a print copy of the article to add to his or her portfolio. "I was written up in the Times," she says, providing hard evidence to this fact. But what about web-only mentions? What is the protocol for web-only "tear sheets"? Does such a practice exist?

In my view, trackbacks serve this function, proactively. If you're laboring away in obscurity, and someone makes mention of something you said or did, wouldn't you like to know about it? Trackbacks tip you off that yes, there's a reason why your ears are burning. Of course, this is also a vehicle for link-love self-promotion on the part of whoever issues the trackback, but by and large this practice is symbiotic. Think of trackbacks as the fading practice of sending thank-you cards: Thanks for the material that I riffed on, made mention of, or was inspired by.

(And yes, I am aware of the "dark" uses of trackback, but I'm not about to condemn trackbacks purely because they have been employed to serve "dark" ends.)

Web feeds are another "blog only" feature that are really only limited by our imagination. Blogs make good use of feeds, often generating feeds without the author truly understanding what any of that means. But ANY web site can generate a feed, for a variety of reasons. Is CNN a blog? Is the BBC a blog? Both generate feeds. What about the local supermarket? What if you could "opt in" and receive weekly print-and-clip coupons? You can, assuming that the store engages in this practice.

Nick Carr provides a somewhat contrary view of feeds: How simple are feeds, he asks, when there are so many options to choose from for actually managing/viewing them? I personally prefer to serve up the feeds, explain what they are, and leave it to the reader to decide how to parse it. Bloglines? NewsGator? Outlook? Thunderbird? Take your pick. I make no secret that I use Bloglines to manage my feeds, and no, I have no skin in the game, so use whatever you prefer.

In short, I view web feeds as "proactive bookmarks". In the olden days (1998), I had to cram my "bookmarks" folder full of sites and methodically go down the list in search of updates. Now, the updates come to me. There is intermittent crabbing around the internet about full-text versus partial feeds, but ultimately, any feeds are good feeds, so long as they tip me off to updates and/or interesting material.

Finally, another allegedly blog-only feature is the ubiquitous comments box. Certain news organizations and web magazines (such as Salon.com) have embraced the comments box as this allows for faster, more open commentary back and forth about the material. Not everyone embraces this, of course, for their own reasons. Comment spam, for example, gets really tiring, and moderation-only message threads are a pain to manage and are off-putting to would-be commentors. I found a great anti-spam module through Drupal (NOT Bad Behavior) that works intuitively to squash the bad stuff while letting the legit stuff through. It has challenges here and there, but the up side is, it learns what to filter out, and I can manually intervene as needed. Yet another reason that I [heart] Drupal, when I'm not [crossed-out heart] Drupal.

I can't stress enough that if you opt to serve up the comments box option, draft, post, and enforce a comments policy. Some blogs/sites are troll heaven. Don't let yours be next. We're all about the free speech here at ethmar.com, however spam and trolling are two definite "zero tolerance" areas. Disagreeing with me is not "trolling". Disagreeing with me all the time is not trolling. Disagreeing in a vacuous, personal, hateful, pointless manner IS trolling. I have a delete key and am not afraid to use it, without apology. (See the bottom of every comment-enabled page here at ethmar.com to view our comments policy.)

So after providing comments, trackbacks (in and out), and web feeds, am I sure that this site is not a blog? After all, it utilizes quite a bit of "blog-only" features. Yes, I'm sure, and rather than define blogs by their bolt-on functionality, why not separate out the bolt-on stuff and focus on the content? If we keep pigeonholing effective functionality as being "just for blogs", how can we expect any sort of widespread use? Not everybody wants to or needs to maintain a weblog. Should this preclude them from generating feeds or allowing web-facing comments?

When Brad Gibson turned me on to Drupal (after much initial resistance), he told me that using it for blogging was to "ignore its functionality by a factor of ten." True that. If ethmar.com is not a blog, Drupal is not a blogging platform, though both contain bloggish functionality. Yes, this is boring semantics, but an argument I choose to make in hopes of helping people get past the restrictive labels and practices of "blog only" and get more out of the web. Without all the bullshit. <EM>