CMSs and Websites and Blogs? Oh my!
As some of you may have heard, I was picked by the Chandler Public Library to teach a beginners blogging class. The class itself went well, but at one point someone asked, “What’s the difference between a website and a blog?”
Needless to say, I was caught off guard and my answer was along the lines of a website is more static in nature whereas a blog is more dynamic in nature. I then gave the example of how a blog has chronological posts and syndication built in, whereas a website doesn’t always have these features.
Unfortunately my answer didn’t really make much sense to this individual; and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I’m not really sure what the answer is?
Definitions of Each…
Taken from Answers.com:
- Website – A set of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization.
- Blog – A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings.
My Thoughts…
If we strip out all mention of rss/atom syndication, CMS, comments, permalinks, pingbacks, et cetera; is it then safe to say that a blog is simply a website with chronological posts?
But What About Syndication, CMS, Comments, Permalinks, and Pingbacks!?
I definitely agree that all the aforementioned features are critical to having an effective blogging experience, and I’m not saying you should go without them. Yet with all those aforementioned features aside, am I correct in saying that the only difference between a website and a blog is chronological posts?
Is this how you would teach it to a Blogging n00b? What do you think?
Sincerely,
~Tomas
I think you are traveling the right road with your definition. There are exceptions, of course, like the blog/website that has no static content, which is really just a blog and is the only content at the web address.
A blog can be one feature of a website or the entire website. That’s not the defining characteristic.
I think for your audience, the key thing to focus on is the serial, chronological posts aspect. They could create a company website that is essentially an electronic brochure that is seldom updated. Or they could create a blog where they constantly provide new material in the form of chronological updates.
But it’s important to distinguish website updates from blog posts. If they make changes to their website, that’s not a blog post. If they add a new page to their website, that’s not a blog post.
This is not a concept people can understand in the abstract. I recommend that you compile a list of blogs for your students to review. Give them some experience with blogs. In a separate list, give them some websites with a blog feature. After exploring these options, after gaining some experience, they can define these things for themselves.
Just an idea for you.
Hey Charlene, that distinction between posts and website updates sounds like great advice!
I have also been tinkering with the idea of performing a live demonstration with something like Google Sites to show them the difference between a website builder and a blogging CMS like WordPress.
To answer the question, it may be useful to look at the history of the web. The WWW was created in the early 1990s with websites: text, graphics, images. Those first sites were static. The information there was published like a book: the website had a publisher who “owned” everything on the website, everybody who visited the website saw exactly the same thing, and only the publisher could update the website. This “fixed” model was and continues to be a great way to present information.
Weblogs, or blogs, arose out of a question: how could one both present information/opinions and have a discussion about that information? They started in the late 1990s. Blogs are composed of messages; users are allowed to comment on the individual messages (like I’m doing right here). All or part of a website could be a blog, or thousands of separate blogs could be hosted on a single website (like wordpress.com).
Blogs have also started to bring fluidity to the information in their discussion: Why should one have to go to the blog’s website to view it? What other blogs/discussions may be interested in a particular blog entry? While a particular blog is anchored to its website, users don’t have to go there to participate in the discussion. Also, anyone who prefers to access the blog through its website should be able to continue doing that.
Twitter is a form of extreme blogging. About 1/3 of the messages on twitter are comments about other blogs. Twitter will never be a substitute for larger blogs, but it brings a particular kind of juiciness to the discussions held on its bigger brothers.
I think we’re all over complicating the question. From the student’s point of view, I would offer the simplest answer and build from there.
For me, that answer would be that “website” is a generic term used to describe a space under a specific web address. In which case, in this generic sense, a blog is a website.
Phil touches on this in his response.
Ultimately, what separates one site from another is the content and format. This is where defining a blog vs. a news site vs. a photo site would come in.
It seems like you jumped right in to defining different types of websites, before laying a basic foundation for what a website is.
@Phil Earnhardt and @chris runoff – You both make great points and I see where you’re coming from.
Believe me, I’ve taken all the feedback and chronicled it—I’m scheduled to teach another class in April and feel much better providing insight into blogs & websites with all the information you have all provided! Thank you!
There is a general principle of computing which few of the general public understand: over time, more levels of indirection get introduced. As an example:
The first digital computers had their instructions hardwired. Programming languages were introduced: machine languages, then assembler (2 levels of indirection). Compiled languages like C and Fortran started to get used; programmers were no longer directly coding to the computer. Object-oriented programming with its polymorphism and garbage collectors further separated the programmer from the hardware.
Interpreted languages like Perl, Javascript, and Python removed programmers further — most programmers stopped knowing or caring what hardware their programs were running on. Cloud computing furthered the division between the developers and the computer: code would expand to run on as few or as many machines as required.
Similar indirection can be seen with operating system. In my youth, nobody would dream of running an OS virtually inside of another one. Today, it’s commonplace. That’s a bit upsetting….
A similar evolution of indirection can be seen with webpages on the Internet: static pages, cookies, database-driven pages, syndication, etc.
This is all good. The bad part is that it’s quite difficult for newbies to understand what’s what. Everything is fuzzy, and you have to understand a bit of the fuzziness before things get more clear. They should also realize that things will continue to get more fuzzy.
Tomas: I’m guessing your students asked to contrast a website to a blog because they were trying to contrast something they knew with something unfamiliar.
One aside: there is one person I know who is still coding commercial PC products in assembler: Steve Gibson (grc.com). He wrote SpinRite, which is a wicked useful disk diagnostic and exerciser. Steve’s about to release a utility that will benchmark a variety of free DNS services against your default DNS server; that program could rock the world when people realize how poorly their default DNS is running.
The only downside: it will only run on PCs (unless, of course, one has some sort of PC emulation running on your Mac). ;-(