Is blogging really that different from any other form of writing?

Blogging is different from other forms of writing in a few important ways:

1. The purpose is whatever the blogger makes it. To educate, inform, convince, promote, share personal experiences, teach, keep up with friends and family; blogs can be used in any of these ways.

2. Anyone can publish anything, immediately. Blogging removes the outside editor from the publication process, meaning more content gets published but it may be of lesser quality. Because there is no one else involved in the writing/editing process, a blogger can post/publish more frequently than writers of other means. Additionally,  in traditional publishing there is always a question of audience: who would pay money to read this? That isn't an issue with blogging; you can have a blog with 0 readers and you haven't lost a dime.

3. Readers can comment immediately, and directly to the blogger or to each other. Bloggers love comments; those with popular blogs devote a lot of time responding to and moderating comments. That's the thrilling part of a blog, for the reader. Imagine reading a tutorial book and you have a question or two about the instructions. What can you do? Read more books, which may present different ways of doing the thing, which still may not answer your question. If you're reading that tutorial on a blog, you can simply ask the authors in the comments.


I have used blogger in the past, and I overall I do like it. I wish some of the analytics were more specific, and I wish creating your own template was easier, but those are my only critiques.

A few weeks ago I made and used a fictional blog in class during a unit on food. A fictional food blogger was traveling in France, blogging about the regional dishes she tried; on the fourth day, she gets sick. Working in groups, the students were to decide if it was a food-born illness or a food allergy; once they had decided, the blog was updated with additional symptoms to guide them toward located the source of the infection.

I also have a knitting blog that has been sorely neglected for months, the poor thing.

I might use this blog as a repository for classroom ideas and language-learning best practices, but I don't foresee that happening in the near future.