If you are a newbie to blogging, you certainly must have pondered on this. I can bet you have had previous experiences with a vast number of websites, and some social networks (communities) like Myspace, Hi5, Facebook…etc. For someone who has visited numerous blogs, it is very easy to recognize a blog even when half asleep, and also easy to differentiate blogs from regular websites and social networks. For a newbie, however, it is a very difficult task.

Although majorities of blogs are standalone, there are still numerous blogs out there (especially corporate blogs) that are attached to, and function as an extension of their corresponding websites or social networks. Not much of a deal, though, one can still consider a blog as some sort of specialized website, or portion of a web site or social network, but it is imperative that we differentiate them from typical websites and communities so that we can easily identify them when need be.

What then differentiates a blog from a website or community? Differences may be observed in many different aspects such as:

• Mode of setup and customization
• Mode of presentation of information
• Frequency of manual update
• Degree of interaction with users
• General look and feel (theme)

Gone are those days when it was “compulsory” that each and every site be built from scratch using html. Today, php and other languages have made it possible for developers to build scripts that can be installed on most servers. Most websites, and even social networks run on pre built and customized scripts. It the nature and degree of customization that makes different websites or social networks built with the same script look different. The above “rule” does not exclude blogs. Majorities of blogs also run on blogging software. Some of the most popular blogging software are blogger, wordpress, typepad, moveable type. The mode of setup and customization is therefore not a point by which one can identify blogs. However, one can rely on the rule of dump that any “site” built with a blogging software is a blog.

In a site, information is presented in pages. In a blog, a majority of the information is presented in posts and comments from users.

The information on a website, though under specific pages which have different content, is not really classified into categories and tags as with blogs. The mesh of information is even made more pronounced when a piece of information in a post is filed under two or more categories.

When one visits a blog, it appears to be nothing but a page with just a few posts. This is because most of the posts are archived. Websites on the other hand, hardly archives information but keeps it in plain pages.

Communities of users, who have rights to actively interact with each other, run social networks as much as possible. The level of user to user and user to site interaction in social networks is very high. On the other hand, there is very little or no user interaction on websites. Blogs do stand somewhere at the middle. Blog users and visitors, depending on the choices of the blog admin, are being given the right to interact with the blog and with other users through comments. Some plugins even make blogs look more like small social networking sites.

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