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10:50:00 AM EDT
Journals? Blogs? Is There a Difference?
This area is called AOL Journals, but you'll notice the tagline up there says "Your Thoughts. Your Blog." Is there a difference between "journals" and "blogs"? And is it something you should worry about?
The answers are "yes, sort of" and "no, not really." Let's talk a little bit about the differences between journals and blogs first.
Journals, roughly speaking, tend to focus on events going on in the writer's immediate life just like a traditional journal might. So, journals can be deeply introspective and even intimate at times (of course, they can also be open and breezy, too). People often journal about things like school, hobbies, pets and relationships.
Blogs, also roughly speaking, tend to be about more general topics and are less obviously oriented to the writer. Some very prominent blogs are about politics and current events (during the recent Iraq conflict "warblogs" were all the rage) while others look at sports or law or entertainment or computing, or other topics. Or they're often a collection of "cool links." Blog entries are often comparatively shorter than journal entries and are more focused on links to other information outside the blog itself.
But it should be noted that these classifications are not at all hard-and-fast. Many "bloggers" will write long, introspective posts and many "journalers" will write short, link-filled entries. Indeed many online writers don't bother to classify what they do at all. They just write what they feel like writing and let other people worry about what to call it.
This is ultimately the best way to approach writing online. Don't worry if what you're writing is a blog, a journal or something in-between, or neither at all. Just write what you want to write, how you want to write it.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
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by the way "search" my name and read my jounal.
~McKenzie~ -
i am new at this. i just started today lol....so..... thanks for the info.
~McKenzie~ -
I'm computer illiterate when it comes to blogs vs. journals. Thanks for explaining the difference. I have a blogged-journal about my real liposuction experiences. It's a diary about a general topic - liposuction - as told by me - introspectively.
:-()
"Search" for my name and you will see it.
12/28/07 9:35 PM