Tom Kim

I’m thinking about how to introduce the possibilities of blogging — and the possible configurations of blogs — to an audience (students, parents, teachers, administrators) that may have a limited idea of what a blog is.

How do I show parents that a blog can be so much more than just a public diary? How do I show my co-workers that the pedagogical use of blogs is not confined to the Language Arts? How do I open my students eyes to the length and breadth of what their place can be with their little vehicle of expression in the blogosphere?

One way is to show a host of examples. Organize a little safari to sample the multiformity of the blogging universe.

But that got me thinking: where exactly does the diversity in blogging lie?

In subject matter, certainly. But if we put subject matter aside — I’m assuming my students understand implicitly that they get to decide on the content of their blogs — what are the dimensions in which blogs differ?

One can take measures of the activity on a blog: frequency and length of posts, number and variety of post categories, the prominence of hyperlinks and other references to content outside of the blog, use of multimedia materials, popularity in hits and feeds, average number of comments per post.

But I’m looking for something more ineffable; something that gives me a better sense of the gestalt of a blog. Some sort of categorization or visualization that will help a beginning blogger understand what they want to aim for when they design and build their blog.

Now I’ve built several blogs in the past few years. I’ve used blogger, xanga, myspace, a paid host with my own domain name, and now, wordpress.com. With each new attempt, I’ve browsed through dozens, even hundreds, of blogs and web sites, trying to formulate my own vision of what I want on this new instance of expression and community. I went through dozens of pre-packaged templates, read countless articles, and even made some hand-coded tweaks of my own on the back-end.

Sometimes I set my standards really high; sometimes I set them really low. Sometimes my expectations evolved as I explored the software and gauged the responses to my posts.

But each time those standards seemed to revolve around two major issues for me: 1) How sophisticated I wanted the design and interface, and 2) What the point of my content was.

So here I propose a humble taxonomy that places blogs along two dimensions so that we can easily plot them as a simple scatter graph like constellations in the blogosphere.

Along the Y-axis is the sophistication and importance of design and interface. On one extreme is a blog of minimal functionality — I suppose a basic web page in which each new post is updated and timestamped by hand. On the other extreme is when the design itself becomes the subject of the blog, and the blog becomes a kind of artistic expression, maybe even to the point where the aestheticism and whizbang interactivity overshadows the actual content of the posts.

Along the X-axis is a dimension of purpose, which for me can be framed as a tension between personal self-expression and community development. On one extreme the blog functions little more than an online diary of one’s idiosyncratic and miscellaneous thoughts with comments closed off and tucked away in some cobwebbed corner of cyberspace. On the other extreme, the blog becomes a kind of social software with a cadre of authors, an ardent community of regular commenters, and a firm loyalty to a single idea or topic that binds everybody together at this particular site.

Now, recently I went to my first Meetup ever: The Philadelphia WordPress Meetup, which was soon followed after, in the same location, by The Philadelphia Bloggers Meetup. I met a lot of really nice people, and later surfed through a lot of interesting blogs. If I plotted them out by my new taxonomy, the graph would look not-really-but-kinda like this:

Yes, I know, a table is the most amateurish way of showing this sort of thing and look the cells don’t even have even widths or heights what are you thinking. And the table doesn’t even fit in the post-space. What can I say? I’m a hapless n00b. If you are willing to create a cool Ajax-y thingamabob then I am more than happy to try to embed it or link to it.

And then there’s the issue of these being qualitative, subjective dimensions. I’m just eyeballing where I think these blogs are based on a quick scan of each respective site. If you’re represented above and you think your place is misrepresented, then please don’t be miffed — just let me know and I’ll adjust it.

All that said, do you think this could be useful? I realized that as I was trying to judge where along the X-axis I had to place these blogs, I had to consider how to factor in the fact that the size of the apparent community at a blog (judging from the number of comments to posts) did not necessarily correspond to how deliberately a blog seemed designed to inspire community. Sometimes a blogger will just have a lot of friends and contacts that will make regular comments though the only real focus of the blog might be the blogger himself or herself. I guess dooce could be a good example of this.

I do think it’s somewhat interesting that most of the blogs represented at the Meetup seemed to gravitate toward the lower left hand corner of the graph. Most people seem content with a pretty basic blog to put their solipsistic thoughts in.

Are there any other Philly bloggers you would put up there? What about blogs at the extremes? Know of any really high-design, high-community sites? What about low-function, high-community sites?

Related Links:
Colin’s gracious synopsis of the Meetup and the various personalities therein.

blog, taxonomy, education, design, plan, purpose