Classify? How?

As the blogosphere grows, the number of blog types grow too. There are personal blogs, organisational blogs, blogs that are categorised according to their genre, such as politics, travel, fashion, and anything you can find under the sun; you name it, you got it. Then, there are blogs classified under their media type, like vlog. Besides that, blogs are now also classified by the device that is used to compose it, like a moblog where people update their phones with a mobile phone (BBC News 2003).

Classifying blogs helps readers find that specific topic that matches their interest and eventually become a medium where they can help one another over worries and concerns, such as Mommy Blogs (Brown 2005). I suppose that is true. However, Mayfield (2004) argues that "the topic or objective of a blog can change over time, as most things do, and most individual blogs defy categorisation".

In ABC's radio transcript titled 'A taxonomy of blogs' (2008), Margaret Simons gave nine very interesting blog classifications. In my humble opinion, her taxonomy differs greatly from other classifications because she takes into consideration the style, format, targeted audience and the topic of the blogs. Ikeda, Takamura and Okumuta (2008, p. 1156) in their research state that it is an important information source to identify the characteristics of a blog in terms of its writing style or topic to better classify that blog.

Thus, I believe the best way to classify blogs is to look at it from every angle like how Simons did. A blog is like a person, complex and made up of many factors. No one factor can define a person, in that same way, no one factor can define a blog.


References:

BBC News 2003, 'Blogging goes mobile', 23 February, viewed 7 November 2009, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2783951.stm>.

Brown, J 2005, 'The drooling minutiae of childhood revealed for all to see as 'Mommy blogs' come of age', Independent, 5 February, viewed 7 November 2009, <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-drooling-minutiae-of-childhood-revealed-for-all-to-see-as-mommy-blogs-come-of-age-485573.html>.

Funnell, A 2008, 'A taxonomy of blogs', ABC Radio National, 25 September, viewed 7 November 2009, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript>.

Ikeda, D, Takamura, H & Okumura, M 2008, 'Semi-supervised learning for blog classification', in Proceedings of the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI.org, pp. 1156-1161.

Mayfield, R 2004, 'Internal and external corperate blogs', Ross Mayfield's Weblog, 13 August, viewed 7 November 2009, <http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/internal_and_ex.html>.