What is a blog? My vision after one year of blogging

Frederick Giasson

One of my friend told me: “Fred, I want you to show me what a blog is”. More and more people are like him, they want to know what his blogging. They know the word but they need to know what it signify. Then it is what I done, giving him an overview of what is a blog and the main services that exist to support them. Then, when I came back from the rendezvous, I asked to myself: Fred, after one year of blogging, what is for me a blog? There we go.

The name blog came from the two words: web log. Technically a blog is nothing more than a website with a certain typical layout and functionalities. Then, technically, what a blog is for me is nothing else than a web page template. This is a common layout used by millions of people. There is nothing new here.

Then, if a blog is technically nothing new, why people talk about them? Good question. We could try to define a blog by his usage, by checking how people are using their blogs.

A blog is used for many purposes:

  • To share daily adventures of an individual person
  • For the marketing of a new product or a whole company
  • To communicate with people that work in the same field of expertise
  • To share ideas
  • To manage knowledge
  • To start discussion
  • To inform about a specific subject or domain
  • To create new contacts with other people

Yes but people are using the web like this since his beginning, no? Yes. Then, my question remains, why people talk about blogs?

Personally, I see blogging as a philosophy, a way to do things. What makes blogs, blogs, is the way people are using them, the bloggers community. This community is drive by an etiquette: the blogging etiquette. It is that etiquette that makes blogs, blogs. All the interactions between bloggers form the Blogsphere. Then, I could now define a blog by a website that follows the blogging etiquette by adding texts to the Blogsphere in hope to start a conversation with other users of that Blogsphere.

This is my vision of blogs and blogging after 1 year.

You, what are blogs for you? What is blogging? What make someone a blogger?

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Gravatar.com is down. What could we do if the worse happened?

Frederick Giasson

Update 20 july 2005:
Tom Werner contacted Lisa today, there is the result: “I left for vacation to China on the 11th, and it seems I forgot to renew the gravatar.com domain before I left. Now I have the rude awakening here in Hangzhou that gravatars have been down since the 15th. Curse my timing! I am renewing the domain right now but it might take a little while to go through and there might be other problems I don’t forsee. Could you to make a little note on your weblog informing the peoples of this misfortune? Tell them I still care!!!!”

Update 18 july 2005: Eliot pointed out that the Gravator site is always up and running. The problem is that the DNS take into account by the registrar. As he said, you only have to change the string “gravatar.com” by the string “64.124.231.223” and everything will work. Take a look at the Gravator’s website.

However the question persists: what happened to Mr. Werner? Is there always someone that manages the system?

Many people know this piece of news: Gravatar.com is down due to domain expiration. However, I just checked the Whois list and it seem to be on hold since some days.

Domain Name: GRAVATAR.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://domainhelp.tucows.com
Name Server: NS3.POLARPHASE.COM
Name Server: NS4.POLARPHASE.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-HOLD
Updated Date: 16-jul-2005
Creation Date: 15-jul-2004
Expiration Date: 15-jul-2006

There are many possibilities that could explain what is happening with Gravatar. However, what is sure is that Tom Werner forgot, intentionally or not, to renew the domain name.

This is a sad story considering that thousands of web sites were using this beautiful little service. Many web site developers were relying on the service, and he fell apart. The problem with this type of service is that it needs to be centralized somewhere. Then when such a service stop to exist, everyone that where using it have nothing to rely on anymore.

So, what could we do? In the next days we will probably know what happened to Gravatar.com, the service we were using. If it happens that the service we once knew is dead, the only thing we have to do is to rebuild it from scratch. Ease? Ease, probably not, but not as hard as some could think. What I suggest? Trying to contact Mr. Werner to know what happens, but Phu tried without success. Another possibility is to rebuilding it under a new name. How? With my time. The only thing I need is the money to host the service for the next year.

So, if it appears in the next days that Gravatar.com is really dead and that I have some support from the community, I will take the time to rebuild it. If it happens, it could be up in the next 3 weeks.

Leave a comment here if you find what happened to Gravatar.com and contact me if you are willing to support me if we need to rebuild the whole system.

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