A blog can be so much more than a traditional website. Where a traditional website is didactic, a blog is interactive. A traditional website is episodic, representing your hobby, business, and even your life, at specific points in time; a blog is linear, a journal of the past, the present, and presumably the future in the form of an online log (literally, a “web log”), but unique to the online world.
While a blog can effectively imitate a traditional website, the opposite is not always true. Because a blog can be so much more than a traditional website, it can also do more for your hobby, business, or life, than you might first expect.
A blog invites its readers to join a conversation with the blogger. Once a post is made, readers may provide feedback in the form of comments or responses. This feedback often becomes the seed for a dialog. Where a traditional website usually represents a single didactic voice, a blog allows for multiple viewpoints. As a platform for discussion, blogs sometimes develop into entire communities built around the blog’s topic.
Traditional websites are largely static, but a blog is dynamic. The information presented on a blog is usually stored in a database, where it can be called upon when needed. With a database in the background, a blog can effectively store and organize much more information than a static website. Because a blog can store and retrieve information, it easily functions as a journal; old information can be stored and referred to as new information is added. Instead of merely presenting a snap shot of you, your hobby, or your business, frozen in one moment of time, a blog can be a great historian.
Since a blog is online it can perform differently than printed material. But a blog can also perform differently than other online media. Both in blogs and traditional websites, internal links can be as numerous or as sparse as you wish; either type of site allows instant access to any of its pages. But blogging software can automate much of the link creation process, saving time and creating more effective links.
A blog is flexible, and can be parsed down until it looks and acts like any other website. But a typical website built in HTML can’t effectively look and act like a blog. Blogs can play host to photo albums, shopping carts, and a host of other functions, and simplify their creation at the same time. On the other hand, a traditional website cannot easily create the interrelated web of articles and posts offered by a typical blogging platform.
But unfortunately, the potential of blogging is not widely understood across the Internet. Many of those who call themselves “bloggers” are operating as though their blog were a static HTML site. Frequently, blogging software like WordPress, Movable Type, and even Blogger, is used as a content management system. Even some “professional” blogs are nothing more than online magazines or databases of articles on a particular topic. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with either of these practices, a blog has so much more to offer than mere content management.
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