Blog-based websites are ALSO websites, guys, there’s nothing dramatically different about blogs. Same rules apply — good content? I’ll be back. Bad content? Nice meeting ya.

Most good websites that pass off as top blogs or whatnot could have been just that without a blogging software powering them. It’s their purpose and activity that make them resonate.

So try to explain blogs as something different or revolutionary and you’ll hit the same walls. Blogging is still largely mistaken to be personal diaries, and it’s the blogging community’s overenthusiasm that has the sole responsibility for it.

A blog is website creation made easy. End of story. Everything else is the same without a blog or with it.

Heck, my boss a month ago said, “we need to get a blog” and me and another developer just kinda looked at each other like, “uh, welcome to 2005″, its nothing new.

Explaining a blog to my father is a hopeless cause. He struggles with getting images from his digital camera let alone use a blog.

Sure, there are plenty of people with a bent for journalism or editorial writing that have found a godsend in the weblog format, getting their message across without a publisher middleman; but a weblog at its most basic concept –a bunch of dated, personal notes stored digitally– still is very much alive and kicking. Where you and I see a platform for a portfolio of essays, for another person might just mean a vehicle to tell his/her closest friends what she did last week, and that’s fine with me. Different strokes and all that.

Sometimes I ponder if those of us that have tried the format for a good while tend to take ourselves too seriously. Then again, these days I just try to publish stuff that won’t be potentially embarrassing five years down the road, so to speak…

Mainstream is the mom test. Does your mother know what blogging is? What about her friends? You know, the ones YOU haven’t explained it to.

My friend Taughnee at endeavorcreative.com wrote a piece today about how difficult it is to explain blogging to someone in a sales pitch. Most people have heard of blogging on the news or read about political bloggers in the paper. But actually read a blog? Actually contemplated writing a blog?

Sorry to hog your comments Erik. You got me rolling on a rant.

The first, was film. The second, was radio & tv. Both of those mediums allowed people with the power to communicate to the world.

But the third — blogging, finally gives the viral power of communication to your neighbor, sitting in his Hooters t-shirt, in his stained EZ chair.

And that is why this technology will not go away. It will evolve, grow, and keep modern day media from ever having the stranglehold on society that they used to have.