But perhaps that's just my opinion.
Numerous people (perhaps even more than my eight readers) have told me that they
consider me a proto-blogger, and that for them the Boidem is a blog. I can understand
that they think this way, since there's no doubt at least a bit of difficulty
involved in trying to distinguish between an ongoing monthly column that's composed
primarily of more-or-less personal reflections on a rather well-defined topic,
and a blog. A
New York Times article on blogging, from 2004, quotes Justin Hall, among the
first people who succeeded in writing his life to the web:
When I first started doing it, they called it a personal
home page; then they said I'm one of the first Web diarists, and now I'm one
of the first Web bloggers
which I suppose suggests that if someone keeps at a particular task long enough, even when the task remains the same, the way it gets defined changes according to the prevailing metaphor of the times.
Still, I think that the differences considerably outnumber the similarities. Though
the hypertextual nature of the Boidem makes it hard to present it in a print format,
its ties to traditional forms of writing seem to me to be stronger than its ties
to blogging.
Go to: That wouldn't happen in a blog post, or
Go to: In one tenth the time