It’s probably impossible to answer this question. It’s a bit like asking, “what makes a good book?” <\/p>\n
Blogs are so many things to so many people – they are forms of journalism, pedagogical tools for university courses, personal diaries, social hangout spaces, places for writing fan fiction, locations for software to be released and discussed… The list is as long as the uses to which blogs have been put, which is to say, more diverse than I can mention.<\/p>\n
Although “early” blog theories (that is, those from about 5 years ago!) emphasised the keeping of journals and diaries as the main function of blogs (Viviane Serfaty’s book<\/a> is a good example of this notion), the explosion of different uses for blogs has led some more recent definitions to reduce what-blogging-is<\/em> to bare technological terms – that is, blogging is a medium<\/em>. This way of defining blogs reduces them to something like this: “Blogs are an online publishing tool; blogs consist of a series of individual “entries”; these entries are usually displayed in reverse chronological order.” (Wikipedia’s definition<\/a> is along these lines.)<\/p>\n As Jill Walker Rettberg<\/a> explains in her great little book called, simply, Blogging<\/a>, within this bare-bones techno-definition of blogging as a medium, various genres <\/em>can be sifted out: political blogging, filter blogging, diary-style blogging, and so on. Each of these genres (and its attendant sub and sub-sub genres) comes with its own set of conventions, and within the genre, those conventions make sense – they can be used to determine a “good” from a “bad” blog.<\/p>\n