Amidst all this anger and annoyance about linking, etc., and my inflated talk of editorial decision-making, Michael Arrington made an interesting, revealing, and somewhat lurid comment: “Engadget is no longer really a blog. They still look like a blog, but they’re bigger than a lot of mainstream media businesses.” Ready for some more navel-gazing? If not, now’s your chance to escape. Ok, so I don’t agree, I think Engadget is a blog. But perhaps it’s time we question what a blog actually is — and through that I’d like to ask, is Engadget (still) a blog?

So I have some questions about “blogs” and “blogging” and the term and the connotation and where all that stands in early 2007. I’m genuinely curious about the answers, and I’ll answer frankly and without preconception after the break; I encourage you to do the same, and to ask questions of your own. (Of course, I’ll post up the good ones and answer them, too.) So…

  1. Is Engadget (still) a blog?
  2. How do you define a “blog”?
  3. Does a blog become “mainstream” when it’s owned by a big company?
  4. Must a blogger blog as an amatuer (i.e. not for a living)?
  5. Do blogs need editorial standards?
  6. What’s the difference in editing a blog and editing an MSM pub?
  7. What’s the real difference between a blog and the MSM?
  8. Is it necessary for blogs to constantly link out?
  9. Does that linking fall into the realm of editorial?
  10. Do A-list bloggers have a responsibility to link to others? (Hat-tip, Sue Polinsky)
  11. Is there such thing as competition in the blogosphere?
  12. So is Engadget REALLY still a blog?

My answers after the break.

Ok, here goes.

  1. Yes.
  2. An online publication with an unfiltered, unfettered editorial voice. Blogs remind me more of zines — which I used to read (and occasionally write) — than anything else. RSS and WordPress help, but really it’s all about the unfettered editorial.
  3. No — that part is up to the company. In the case of Engadget, we were lucky enough that AOL didn’t screw with our product. I’ve always said if AOL forced us to change our editorial or to in some way conform, then I’m out. On the other hand, is Pogue’s blog a blog? Surely what appears in his RSS feed is just as rigorously edited by the NYT as any of their front page stories. (Maybe I’m wrong, I honestly don’t know whether that’s true.) If so, I’d say it’s not a blog.
  4. I don’t think so. I started blogging as an amatuer; in the early days I wrote for Engadget for free because Pete was my pal, the gig was fun, and I got to learn about lots of interesting new tech. A couple years later I may have health insurance and a paycheck signed by some guy at AOL, but my goals are the same, and the spirit and nature of the work is identical. Only the particulars differ — as they would over the years at any job.
  5. That’s up to the blog, but I think so, yes. In a free and open environment where unfettered discussion is at the core, I think every voice and every venue needs to know its bounds, and remain consistent with that in dialogue.
  6. This is a very difficult question. Engadget is edited… be it by me or by Evan or by Pete or anyone else. We have always had a traditional masthead even when the rest of Weblogs, Inc. was standardizing around blog titles like “leads” and “producers”. So yeah, you can say we mimic that old style, but I think things are very different.At a traditional publication you get an assignment by your editor or pitch him/her a story idea. Once everyone agrees, a draft is written, submitted, vetted, edited, often returned. A second draft is submitted, and possibly accepted. It may be edited further; it may be spiked, it may run, but there’s a definite process where the draft 1 you write may very wellnot even resemble the final draft that makes it into print. (In fact, the piece I co-wrote with Pete for Business 2.0 a couple years back had a third writer tacked onto the byline, whom neither of us had ever met or spoken with. No surprise, the article was significantly altered.)

    At Engadget I trust our writers to write and write well; I may occasionally edit some writing, but I try not to. I tend think of myself more as a guide, a place to bounce ideas off, a consult to turn to. If one of our writers gets a wild idea of something they want to write about on Engadget, they’re generally free to do so and post it. I only ask that it be interesting, consistent, and within our editorial boundaries. (See #5)

  7. Well, I think I answered that a couple of times now, but I asked myself the question, and the answer is: an unfettered medium to air an unfettered voice.
  8. This is like asking if it’s necessary if blogs need to have RSS to be considered blogs — not so in my opinion, but it helps! Blogs have evolved past a medium for basic conversation; they’re now used as op/ed galleries and art projects and — gasp — sources for news. Do you have to link to be a part of the conversation? No, but it helps!
  9. Yeah, absolutely. If it’s on your blog, it’s a part of your editorial. The NYT doesn’t link. It’s not as though it links sometimes but not other times — every time Engadget has been mentioned in the NYT, we’ve never gotten a link. Why is that? I don’t know, it’s oldthink to me, that linking to your “competition” is out of bounds — but it’s a consistent editorial decision they’ve made, and love it or hate it, it’s obviously a part of their editorial guidelines. That is, as I’ve mentioned, something we bloggers all have in common. Who you link to is what you vouch for — that’s the principle on which Google works — and you wouldn’t link somewhere you wouldn’t want to send someone, right? It’s an editorial decision, alright.
  10. Oh sure, everyone has that responsibility. Share and share alike, golden rule, however you want to peg it, if you find a sweet link and write about it, it’s your responsibility as a good neighbor to credit the source and where you found it. But as in Q#9, if you happen upon a link you don’t find interesting, don’t much care for, or violently disdain sending people to, how could anyone be obligated to share that anyway? Again, we all make that choice, which reflects back upon ourselves and our own tastes.
  11. This is one I find particularly interesting. If this is all just a conversation, a dialogue, a gallery of unfettered voices, is there really a competition? If so, is it a competition like a debate, or something else? Well, I suppose the competition is to get the most page views, to make the most money you can, garner all the respect possible, whatever you can come up with. However you cut it, I don’t think it’s really the same competition as print pubs face.For example, most newspaper subscribers subscribe to one, maybe two papers. Say the WSJ and a local paper. Why not subscribe to dozens, hundreds of papers? Money, space, paper, very real and finite factors. And so when that reader unsubs from WSJ to sub to the Washington Post, the WSJ loses money and competition is real and present.

    But a free, virtual space can support limitless subscription and attention; brain-space is our only finite ceiling. There is a new gadget blog started every week it seems, but we only continue to grow — and perhaps most telling of all, I don’t often see our “competitors” drop off the radar. Media bubble? Maybe, but what I’m trying to say is ultimately I don’t think of what we’re doing as competition. With Engadget we’re here to write what we want to write, and I’m grateful and blessed that we’ve found an audience.

  12. Hmm, that’s a lot of pontificating I just did. Having thought all this out on paper (figure of speech), I… still do think we’re a blog. A blog with a lot of responsibility, a blog owned and back by a big media company, a blog that provides health-care, but a blog all the same. Now someone take my damned keyboard away, will you?