MaxLighthouse

That question is frustrating for some of you. I found a discussion of this question here.

Website or Weblog?

A weblog is a website and a part of the Web but its structure, how it is presented to visitors, and development is markedly different. A typical or traditional website may have many sections spawned from a top-level menu system whose pages may in turn contain further sub-menus leading to articles, reviews, product details, services or some other form of content. Developing, maintaining and updating site content frequently requires a webmaster (or a team of specialists for the larger corporate websites) and may incur costs in the tens of thousands of [dollars] for a medium size business.

From a presentational perspective a weblog is far simpler, usually comprising a single ‘home’ page whose entries are presented in reverse chronological order. It may contain summarised text and links to archived content and a list of other blogging sites. Creating and updating a blog is a simple exercise requiring minimal technical expertise – and the majority of online blogs cost the owner nothing other than time and energy to manage. There are none of the costs or technical know-how associated with purchasing a unique domain name and finding a hosting company on which to mount a site as these are borne by the service provider.

Weblog Characteristics

Contemporary weblogs illustrate a number of characteristics: They are expected to be visible to the Web at large; they comprise frequently updated commentary, articles or dialogue as a dated chronology, most recent first; they have some form of archiving feature, usually accessible through an onscreen calendar; are increasingly open to commentary from visitors (creating a ‘threaded’ dialogue); and are usually free to create and update.

Further, a dedicated blogging environment will be based upon a content management system (CMS) - a simple interface through which content can be updated – be configurable through use of a programmatic interface permitting layout and look-and-feel adjustment, have an option to accept visitor feedback commentary, and offer the ability to include images and XML feeds (a method of viewing content indirectly).

An increasing number of blogs now incorporate syndication features such as RSS feeds. Typically, these permit remote access of blogs by feed aggregators, programs which monitor hundreds or thousands of blogs for updates, informing the user of fresh or edited content. Such a simple yet powerful alert flagging system helps bloggers keep in touch with their favourite blogs.

And here’s another good article about “What is a Blog?” that gives Five Characteristics of a Blog:

“I can define them for you very easily,” Jason Calcanis says. “There are three main features of a blog: the first is reverse chronological order, the second is unfiltered content [the blogger says whatever he feels; no one is editing and changing his words] – the second somebody filters or edits the author it’s no longer a blog — and the third is comments.”

Calcanis might add a fourth condition: hypertext links to the world outside the blog.  “The idea of blogs is to LINK OUT to good things on the Internet. …”

The tendency of bloggers to excerpt chunks of attributed text, sometimes at length, from other sources, could be a fifth defining characteristic of blogs.