10 types of blogs - which do you prefer?

I wonder whether the human race has ever before engaged in so much writing and reading as it has since the blogging habit took hold towards the end of the 20th century! 

Did Jorn Barger, who coined the term ‘weblog’ back in 1997, envisage that blogging would become so popular that now anyone who has internet access can ‘have their say’ to a potentially world-wide audience? Who would have guessed at that time that so many of us would find that blogging would fulfil a latent need in many of us to be ‘heard’, to have our own little corner of the world wide web where we can express ourselves, show off our work or simply broadcast news about our everyday lives?

A weblog is literally a ‘log’ on the web, a log being ‘a book in which records are kept’, for instance a ‘captain’s log', something like a diary or journal.  But out in the teeming blogosphere, the term has been extended to encompass all sorts of types of entries, the one thing they have in common being that they are updated regularly and appear in chronological order.

So here are a few of the different categories of blogs and links to one of my favourites in each category. (Of course there are many other wonderful blogs I could have listed but where would I stop?)

1. Online journals – often written to describe a change in life circumstances or an actual journey (travel-log). What makes them interesting? They offer us a view into something or some place where we would not otherwise have gone and if they’re well written, we can feel as if we are carried off to some far place with the writer. Some of these journals have become so popular that they’ve been published as books, particularly if they have the ability to move us as well as amuse us.

http://www.shesnotfromyorkshire.com/

2. Artists’ blogs – again a kind of journal but with less writing and more images or videos to illustrate the day-by-day, week-by-week ‘journey’ of the artist.

http://karinjurick.blogspot.com/


3. Group blogs – a format often used by groups of artists. An advantage is that the content is kept fresh without too much of a burden on each individual artist

http://thesketchables.blogspot.com/

4. Celebrity blogs – often mostly ‘promotional’ with a few tidbits of information about the celebrity thrown in.

http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/

5. Corporate blogs – a way that a company can keep customers and potential customers updated about their products and services.

http://blog.sockdreams.com/2010/09/03/socks-for-school-uniforms/


6. Promotional blogs. Similar to a corporate blog but written by an individual to promote their products. There may be some news updates but the chronological nature of the blog is relatively unimportant.

http://ullahennig-zazzle.blogspot.com/


7. ‘Musings and Ponderings’ blogs. Here the objective is not to promote anything but again the chronology is generally  unimportant as the blogger writes about anything that occurred to them that they think will be of interest to their readers. Questions are often asked and readers’ responses are an important feature of this kind of blog, which seeks to fire off a discussion, either on the blog itself or at least in the reader’s mind.

http://freetospeakblog.blogspot.com/


8. Information/advice blogs. Many such blogs that I’ve come across, though not all, focus on tips about IT use, about blogging, about search engine optimisation etc. The blogger comes across as very authoritative and helpful, which is likely to be true as many of them make their living from blogging!

http://www.copyblogger.com/


9 Political blogs – these are really online commentaries of political events, such as might be found in a newspaper or magazine and in fact they are often written by journalist. The difference is that there is a ‘comments’ option.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny


10. ‘None-of-the-above’ blogs! Of course there has to be a category for blogs that don’t fit neatly into any of the other nine categories I’ve listed. My favourite is –

http://www.robertbrault.com/

A great many blogs, perhaps the majority of them, don’t fit into any one of these categories but are more ‘hybrid’ in nature. I would include my own blog in this! Maybe this comes about as we try to discover as we go along just what kind of blog we are writing! Or maybe that’s the way we want it to be – something for everyone. When I started blogging, nine months ago, I announced at the outset that it would be a bit of a hotch-potch and so it has turned out to be!


One of my favourites is: http://www.artsyshark.com/


Blogs fall into many categories – which sort do you prefer to read? And do you have a favourite?