Is this a blog? Do you know? Do you care? From my context this is a blog and I think most of our contributors consider themselves bloggers. But for you the reader these facts are largely immaterial. You’re here for the ideas -and the free chicken wings-. How those ideas are added to the site and how they are presented on the page are of little importance. And the same probably holds for most of the readers of most of the blogs out there.

Readers generally don’t know or care that your blog is a blog. Jonathan Carson at BuzzMetrics crystallized my thinking on this in his post “Is blog going to be an industry term?”. I think it already is. “David Galbraith” came to the same conclusion saying:

With magazines and professional websites being blog driven, blog refers to the way something is published not what. There is no more need to know what a blog is than know what an internal combustion engine is if you drive a car. This is a paradigm shift as important as the browser. Web 1.0 was about reading (browsing and searching), Web 2.0 is about publishing. For the investors that are looking to invest in blogs or RSS — that’s like investing in HTML, the big story is publishing.

When designing One Degree we went out of our way not to call it a blog and to avoid blogging terms like “permalinks”. We failed in a few spots (“posts” and “entries” come to mind) and we’re working on cleaning that stuff up soon.

Generally we marketers get way too close to what we do. It’s great that we sweat the details and debate various strategies, but when it comes time to speak to our audience, we need to speak their language, not ours. “GoDaddy” did a great job of this in their “Superbowl Commercials” — think what you will of the ads themselves, but they did a great job of nailing what they were from the audience’s perspective: “It’s a website where you can register dotcom names for only $8.95 a year”.

One Degree isn’t a blog, it’s a web site. It doesn’t have posts, it has articles. Right?

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on July 28, 2005.