What is Blogging?

A VC's take on blogging

Blogging is about three things:

Posting, Subscribing, and Tagging.

These are the three essential and fundamental functions and they are the building blocks for all the different kinds of blogging.

Posting came first.

In my Blogging 1.0 post last year, I suggested that people have been blogging in some form since the advent of the Internet. Creating Geocities pages; Guides working for the Mining Company (About.com’s first name); and Jim Cramer’s hourly posts from his trading desk were all early forms of blogging.

Subscribing came next.

RSS is a big deal, but it’s a technology not a human behavior. It’s like TCP/IP or HTML. It’s an enabler. But subscribing to RSS feeds is a human behavior and it’s fundamental to the whole blogging equation.

Tagging is the third and final leg of the stool.

First there’s self tagging. That is when the person making the post contributes some descriptive tags to the post. That’s how most of the Flickr tags are created.The second kind of tagging is user tagging. That’s what del.icio.us and others offer. This is when the person consuming the content contributes a tag. In the del.icio.us world, its in connection with bookmarking the content so that it can be remembered and shared.