Is Slashdot a blog?
I would call slashdot one of the earliest and most influential blogs, although the fact that they publish reader-submitted stories (not just comments on the stories) does set it apart a bit from most others. Nonetheless, the content is very bloggish. Wikipedia, OTOH, has very unbloggish content, for the most part (excepting the Talk pages and a handful of special pages, but these are none of them the focus of the site).
Perhaps the more interesting question is, is Perlmonks a blog? I mean, yes, the subject matter is technical, but surely there are blogs with highly technical subject matter (e.g., In The Pipeline is clearly a blog, and organic chemistry is every bit as technical as Perl, or at least would appear so to the layman), so I don't think that alone can exclude it.
| [reply] |
Interestingly enough, my employers seem to regard Perlmonks as a blog.
I recently posted to a recent thread on consultancies, where I named and linked to my employers' website. I received a call from my manager, who it seems had received a call from the corporate blog police. Apparently, there are guidelines about what individuals are allowed to say when posting to their own blogs. This was news to my manager too. I wasn't saying anything bad about my employer, quite the contrary in fact.
The simple resolution was to remove references to the company name of my consultancy, and remove the web link. It was probably through http_referer that they picked up the reference.
| [reply] |
Much like Perl, English is context sensitive. Things like "few" and "many" are relative frequencies to other possible activities you do. To someone who reads a lot of stuff on the web, a "few" blogs might be 5. But to someone who reads almost nothing 5 would be "many".
That's okay!
The purpose of the poll isn't to quantify the number of blogs people read. (If it were, the poll would list numeric options.) Rather it's objective is to measure the perception of the relative personal importance of blogs among the monks. "How many people feel like they read a few versus many?" is fundamentally a question of feelings, not metrics.
| [reply] |