My heavens, every time I hear this I cringe.
“I wrote a blog…”
No, you didn’t, you newbie! You wrote a BLOG POST.
You don’t write an envelope, do you? NO. You write a letter.
“Hold on, I’m writing an envelope to grandma!”
Get it?
Blog vs. blog post.
If you blog, learn the difference.
(now, someone find me a ladder so I can get off the soapbox :p)
You know where this mistake most likely originates, right?
MySpace.
For a long time – though I don’t know whether they still do, as I have let my MySpace go – MySpace referred to it as “posting a blog.” Long enough, surely, for the mistaken practice to catch hold, at least among current and former MySpace subscribers.
Interesting history.
I usually hear it from older, never-would-have-been-on-myspace people…
Actually, that’s exactly what I was going to write — we post blog entries. Don’t get me started on how people write…or what they think they’re writing or what they think they’re saying. Soapbox indeed! More like primal venting! ;0
Oh no! I say that. LOL. You’re right though. 😉
Hi, Jason,
I think of writing a post on a blog as similar to what I do when I write my column (“Stats, Sites and Stuff”) for the E-Bridge newsletter for The Alliance. I’m reporting information others benefit from, it’s distributed virtually, and I update it weekly with fresh news and data. So perhaps others who write in different venues could apply what they do to writing a blog post (er…blog column?)Ha, ha.
~Kathy
And there I was thinking I have been writing articles for my dynamic and interactive websites!
How wrong I was – I’ve been posting post on my blogs all along
Karin H (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)
@Darlene – I can see where “entry” comes from… a journal entry … and blogging used to be considered online journaling…
@Jennifer – that’s okay – no one will really care except uptight bloggers like me. But now you know, if you ever go to a blogger meetup, to talk about the blog as a whole and the posts as individual… er… entries :p
@Kathy – hilarious… blog columns :p
@Karin – you bring up some intersting points.
First, many bloggers don’t want to be considered bloggers because a few years ago there was a major divide between professional journalists who indeed wrote “articles,” and the “look mom, I got a wordpress blog up – I’m a journalist” who wrote anything but articles (according to the professionals).
As veteran bloggers we know where we stand. Me? I feel like I write fairly good stuff BUT I know I don’t kick out stuff that is as good as a professional journalist – when I read some of their best stuff I think “wow, there is a huge diff between their quality and mine!”
Second, articles vs. posts. I like to think of posts as shorter than articles. I assume (good or bad?) that my readers don’t want to read a lot… so my posts are shorter than what an article would be… not as indepth, covering less topics/issues/ideas… one benefit to that is I can take an article and break it into 5 blog posts – and now I have content for an entire week 🙂
I’ve seen a number of newspaper sites start to write SMALL articles in a blog post format (with lots of complaints from readers)… maybe small is becoming trendy?
😉
I am a blogger because I use a blogplatform to write articles. We could dive further into the history – blog is short for weblog, way back when this online tool was used to write down as substitute for a paper log (diary).
I write articles about subjects either related to my business (wooden flooring) on:
our static website
our FAQ & news blog
in email messages (auto-responders and broadcasts)
in ScreenSteps Live spaces
on DIY-forums/wikis
or related to being in business on my other blogs.
Those articles can be short, medium or long – it just depends on what message/story at that moment in time is I want to tell and who’s listening.
The length of content IMHO does not determine if it can be called an article or a post. I can break an article into various sub-articles or if you like post them in a certain sequence in a multitude of mediums.
Writing either a post or article – feel free to name it what you like, does it really matter?
What does matter to me if I read your article or post or entry that your passion about/for the subject comes out, that’s IMHO the most important item of writing 😉
Karin H