by Demonweed » Fri Mar 19, 2010 6:58 am
When I first read this question, two issues rose to the foreground of my mind. However, in reviewing this thread I also believe the fact vs. opinion issue merits attention. I do not see blogs as necessarily limited to the realm of opinion. Perhaps some of the most popular blogs today are centered around political discussions in which facts far too rarely mingle with personal pontifications and outright deceptions. However, there is nothing about blogs and blogging that prohibits the inclusion of facts.
As it happens, many of the original blogs were nothing more than online personal journals, full of content that was largely factual even if also of no particular interest to the general public. Before there ever was a Web, the term "log" clearly did not exclude the work of diarists focused chiefly on factual content. For example, much of the available data on 19th century weather comes from logs that were almost entirely composed of empirical data with negligible personal commentary in the mix. Likewise, the FCC requires commercial transmitter operators to maintain logs that may contain dozens or even hundreds of pages of numerical tables for each plain English comment added to the paperwork (or at least, that is how it was in the 90s when I was an FM board operator.)
This takes me to my first thought, which was that APOD seems to fit the definition of a "photoblog." Regular serial publication of photographs in a timestamped online resource seems to fit the bill when it comes to photoblogging. Though many such sites feature extensive commentary, others offer very little content apart from the imagery. In many cases that imagery is in no way doctored save for resizing and compression practiced for ease of distribution.
In essence, the photographs are "factual" because they capture real sights and present images of those sights with no deliberate distortion of meaningful detail. Yet even when (as is occasionally the case with APOD,) enhancements and compositing are part of the process, those expressions of creativity do not push the project outside the bounds of blogging any more than the inclusion of poetry, hand drawn art, or political opinion would invalidate the "blog" label for other projects.
Yet there is also the matter of institutional vs. personal. Originally, blogs were distinctively personal works involving little collaboration and no institutional affiliation. However, the concept seems to have evolved in such a way as to embrace a wide range of institutional projects as of 2010. Small businesses, government agencies, coherent working groups, and vast enterprises are all categories known to produce blogs to provide regular (or highly sporadic) updates to Internet users.
Ten years ago, I might have questioned the notion that a NASA blog could exist (as opposed to a blog identified with an individual or small group of collaborators.) Today this seems non-controversial. Even if one grants the argument that early institutional projects identified as "blogs" were abusing the term, language evolves to accept mutations born of such abuse. Ain't that the truth? With all that in mind, I voted yes in this poll.
When I first read this question, two issues rose to the foreground of my mind. However, in reviewing this thread I also believe the fact vs. opinion issue merits attention. I do not see blogs as necessarily limited to the realm of opinion. Perhaps some of the most popular blogs today are centered around political discussions in which facts far too rarely mingle with personal pontifications and outright deceptions. However, there is nothing about blogs and blogging that prohibits the inclusion of facts.
As it happens, many of the original blogs were nothing more than online personal journals, full of content that was largely factual even if also of no particular interest to the general public. Before there ever was a Web, the term "log" clearly did not exclude the work of diarists focused chiefly on factual content. For example, much of the available data on 19th century weather comes from logs that were almost entirely composed of empirical data with negligible personal commentary in the mix. Likewise, the FCC requires commercial transmitter operators to maintain logs that may contain dozens or even hundreds of pages of numerical tables for each plain English comment added to the paperwork (or at least, that is how it was in the 90s when I was an FM board operator.)
This takes me to my first thought, which was that APOD seems to fit the definition of a "photoblog." Regular serial publication of photographs in a timestamped online resource seems to fit the bill when it comes to photoblogging. Though many such sites feature extensive commentary, others offer very little content apart from the imagery. In many cases that imagery is in no way doctored save for resizing and compression practiced for ease of distribution.
In essence, the photographs are "factual" because they capture real sights and present images of those sights with no deliberate distortion of meaningful detail. Yet even when (as is occasionally the case with APOD,) enhancements and compositing are part of the process, those expressions of creativity do not push the project outside the bounds of blogging any more than the inclusion of poetry, hand drawn art, or political opinion would invalidate the "blog" label for other projects.
Yet there is also the matter of institutional vs. personal. Originally, blogs were distinctively personal works involving little collaboration and no institutional affiliation. However, the concept seems to have evolved in such a way as to embrace a wide range of institutional projects as of 2010. Small businesses, government agencies, coherent working groups, and vast enterprises are all categories known to produce blogs to provide regular (or highly sporadic) updates to Internet users.
Ten years ago, I might have questioned the notion that a NASA blog could exist (as opposed to a blog identified with an individual or small group of collaborators.) Today this seems non-controversial. Even if one grants the argument that early institutional projects identified as "blogs" were abusing the term, language evolves to accept mutations born of such abuse. Ain't that the truth? With all that in mind, I voted yes in this poll.