Classification of Blogs & Opinion on the Best Classification Approach

About 30,000 - 40,000 new weblogs consisting of different combinations of styles are being created everyday making identifying them strenuous. With all the blogs on the internet, it is only prudent that blogs should be classified for a better and convenient searching experience (Sifry, 2005).


One can classify a blog by its form of authorship. (Werbach, 2001). Bloggers that act alone or individually makes up the majority of blogs. However, some blogs are collaborative in nature. This means that some blogs have multiple writers and can be an open-source blog. Examples would be www.indymedia.org and www.slashdot.com.


Another way to categorize blogs is through subject matter. This includes:


1. Media digests - comes with commentaries (Roberts-Witt, 2001)


2. Academic/ professional interest (Block, 2001)


3. Traditional link-filters. (Blood, 2000, Fleishman, 2001, Higgins, 2000 and Werbach, 2001)


4. Me-Zines - Alex Kuczynski defines it as an 'electronic magazine featuring opinions from one'. Me-zines can also be controversial  like Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) and political (Kuczynski, 2001).


5. Personal journals -vary in design and content. (Rainer, 2001 and Roberts-Witt 2001)


In comparison to both ways of classification, Werbach (2001) uses authorship to categorize blogs. It is a more general way as the number or authors and not the contents of the blog is used to differentiate a blog from another while most writers classify a blog through subject matter which is more specific and detailed as supported by Chettri (2011) and Carter (2011).




References


1. Sifry, D, 2005, State of the Blogosphere March 2005, Part 1: Growth of Blogs, viewed 20th August 2011, <http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000298.html>


2. Chettri, S, 2011, What is Blogging? What are the Different Types of Blogs?, viewed 20th August 2011, <http://www.netchunks.com/different-types-of-blogs/>


3. Carter, D, 2011, Blogging What You Don't Know, viewed 20th August 2011, <http://www.articlebiz.com/article/193242-1-blogging-what-you-dont-know/ >


4. Funnel, A, Davies, A, 2008, A Taxonomy of Blogs, viewed 20th August 2011, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript>