Scoble puts forth his definition of blogs which I find far too narrow.
First. If you’re a blog you apparently have to send pings:
I would go as far as saying that a site that does not ping a pingserver, like weblogs.com, is NOT a blog (private Web sites don’t ping weblogs.com and are NOT discoverable by search engines).
That’s not a very healthy requirement. Were people blogging before ping servers? Yes. If I disable pinging am I a still a blogger?
The key issue with me is the fact that 80% of pings are spam and garbage. For the most part they’re useless. Someone really needs to spend some time hear and clean this up a bit.
If you’re thinking of writing a new blog search engine or RSS aggregator I’d recommend totally and completely ignoring pings. Tailrank only really uses pings to re-prioritize and we index often enough that it really doesn’t matter that much.
Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
This is a requirement? Technorati doesn’t care if you have an RSS feed. Tailrank doesn’t. Google doesn’t. Having a feed is a great idea but I don’t see this as being a requirement.
Blogging is a social phenomenon not a technical one. Robert should know this. What was new and innovative about blogs was the permalink. The fact that people could link to their ideas and easily post a response.
Whether you send pings or support RSS is totally optional. Ask every 16 year old myspace user if they blog and they’ll respond with an astounding yes. Ask them if they know anything about RSS or pings and they’ll just stare at you…
