How many types of blogs are there out there, really?

The answer to the question above is pretty blurry as to there are no one research that specializes on genre of blogs. In fact, even if they were to have classifications by subject matter (i.e, travel, political, history, fashion, news), people who blogs about their daily lives may occasionally blog about political views. Isn’t this an overlap? Therefore, whether or not blogs really be classified and fitted into respected categories is an issue. However, there are still active debates and discussion over this matter where blogs are more normally classified by subject matter (eg. as mentioned above) and media type (vlog, linklog, sketchlog, tumblelogs).

According to Simons (2008), there are approximately nine types of blogs. She stated that the ‘Diary’ type of blog is the suspected majority where people post updates involving their families, daily lives and what has or what is going to be done. A typical blog would contain texts, images and sometimes videos (phpWebScripts.com 2008). Again, how do we segregate them is the question?

Another type of classification would be media type. A weblog that contains videos is called a video blog or in short vlog while blogs with short posts and a mixed variety of media is considered as a tumblelog. A sketchlog on the other hand would be blogs that contains portfolio of sketches (Phoebe 2007). However, according to Phpwebscripts (2008), there are too many types of blogs, differentiated not only by their content type but also by how the content is expressed and written, hence leaving the question of this post open.

Below are some examples of media type classified blogs:


Sketchlog


Vlog


Tumblelog

References:

Phoebe, TPL 2007, ‘An Insight of blogosphere over the internet’, Jasa Review Papers, School of Management and Information Technology, UZCSI.

PHPwebscripts.com 2008, ‘Blog scripts’, viewed 11 April 2010, http://www.phpwebscripts.info/Applications/blog-scripts.html

Simmons, M 2008, The Media Report: "A taxamony of blogs", ABC Transcript, viewed on 11 April 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript

The Current Phenomenon of Blogging

Back in the days, many people writes about their daily lives, perspectives and thoughts in their ‘personal diaries’ to express themselves. However, in the world of today, ‘blogging’ has evicted those old school ways of people expressing themselves where now they actually expresses and shares their views from political and social aspects to reviewing their daily lives, with the rest of the people, or more specifically, to the entire world. Based on the figures shown on Technorati, the number of blogs tracked back in October 2004 amounted to 4 million while as of early 2009, the number has grew to +/- 200 million weblogs. Also, Pingdom.com as of the year 2009 reported that studies by BlogPulse found that the amounts of blogs are at 126 million.

Attached are figures that show the ever increasing number of blogs from year 2004 to 2007.

According to Garman (2007), his studies reviewed that 28% of Malaysia’s top 50 bloggers writes about their personal stuff, 16% on political views and 16% on technology. Based on these facts, it shows that blog readers are quite updated with Malaysian politics. The benefit that people can obtain from these blogs is that they can argue and discuss their different views on latest updates of politics, by using the chat box and comment boxes. Besides that, bloggers that provides hyperlinks will allow public to view the news they are reviewing about with only one click.

References:

Gaman 2007, ’50 Most Influential Blogs in Malaysia’, Sabahan.com, viewed 10 April 2010, http://www.sabahan.com/2007/02/06/50-most-influential-blogs-in-malaysia/

Hopkins, L 2009, ‘Technorati and the size of the blogosphere: it can’t be THAT hard to figure out, surely?!’, Leehopkins, viewed 10 April 2010, http://www.leehopkins.net/2009/12/26/technorati-and-the-size-of-the-blogosphere-it-cant-be-that-hard-to-figure-out-surely/

Pingdom 2010, Internet 2009 in numbers, viewed 10 April 2010, http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers/