Blogs and Web logs

John Naughton, on the difference between writing for Web and writing for print:

The other difference between writing for print and writing for one’s blog is that there comes a moment with the print essay when it has to be ‘finished’ and dispatched to the sub-editors: there’s an ‘end-point’, in other words. But, in a sense, a blog post is never ‘finished’; there’s always the possible of ongoing revision in the light of comments, or second thoughts, or sheer, unreasoning loss of nerve. You could say, therefore, that writing for print is like sculpting in stone, whereas writing for a blog is like sculpting in jelly that hasn’t quite set.

It’s a nice post that also visits the difference between blogs and their less-wordy antecedents, Web logs. I’m glad for evidence that I’m not the only one to remember the original purpose of blogs: to collect interesting links to other places online.

I come back to that definition every time I start to feel guilty about not posting enough longish pieces to this blog. I reason with myself, saying that it’s okay to post mostly short posts and links with excerpts. That is, after all, how the founding fathers of the blogosphere would have done it.

Still, when I sit down to write a longer text of any kind, I worry that my tendency to post short, unremarked items has eroded my attention span. I worry that every time I sit down with my iPod Touch at night to read or do whatever rather than read from an actual book.

It’s an old complaint, in Web terms, and I know it’s something of an overstated complaint. Yet I try to think back to my time in college as an English student, reading long, un-wired texts for hours at a time with only a pencil and a lamp. I try to think about doing that again and I wonder if I could.

Related posts:

1. Web first or not?
2. Welcome
3. Comment moderation: How far is too far?
4. Opinions on holding content for print
5. Print headlines don’t always work online