Mathemagenic

What a blog is? discussion at misbehaving turns into actions: Liz Lawley and danah boyd are starting research in order to come up with weblog definition for research purposes. The discussion is worth reading, but I don't have much time for a summary now.

Would be interesting to know how these ideas could be connected with upcoming paper on framework for analysing weblogs by Kaye Trammell and Urs Gasser.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Ross Mayfield's Weblog in Fisking the Fisk on differences between weblogs and wikis:

I took Jeff Jarvis to task for Fisking, the act of ruthlessly ripping apart an article or arguement point-by-point. Weblogs are rediculously easy Fisking tools. You copy a body of text and intersperse your own commentary. Generally, the commentary is short and quippy and stands out from larger blocks of quoted text. Its actually easier than writing your own point or and fits with the copy-paste culture of blogspace. The strength of the Fisk is we can fact check your ass and reveal the devil detail by detail. The downside is the form of the Fisk actually inflames personalities.

[...]Contrast this with any contoversial page within Wikipedia. Wikis de-emphasize personality, reveal group voice, and put emphasis on content. However, the impermanence of the page as opposed to the post doesn't satisfy the communications of many. Which is why many controversial issues within Wikipedia are escalated to dicussion lists (which would be better done by blog). In the worst case, you take advantage of the infinite space in a wiki to offer differing definitions of the controversial entry, with the original page as a fork point.

In simplified way I would say that wikis are "converging conversational tools", taking convergence to the extream, where original points together with identities of their authours are lost (hm, may be when wiki is not a "conversational" tool anymore :). Blogs are more "diverging" tools, with capability to take points to their extremes (when it gets to "inflaming personalities" :)

This post also appears on channel weblog research