Classification of Blogs

In this day and age, the World Wide Web contains millions of blogs covered with different topics and targeting to different audiences. Smich (2010) argues that there are various kinds of blogs which range from diary types to news information types. As such, it is pretty hard to classify them specifically.

For myself, I categorize blogs basically by their subject matter. Such as:

·         Food

·         Law

·         Travel

·         Sports

·         Politics

·         Fashion

·         Technology/Gadgets

·         News

Generally, according to Farrington (2009), blogs can be classified into four basic types:

• Personal Blogs - Blogs that act as a diary.
• Corporate Blogs - Blogs specifically for one's business.
• Professional Blogs - Blogs that focuses and specialize in specific subjects and fields of work.
• Micro Blogs - Blogs that have short texts and they post up micro media like pictures.

On the other hand, Margaret Simons, an Australian author and media analyst, classified blogs into 9 categories (Funnell and Davies, 2008):

• Pamphleteering blogs - political, social movement.
• Digest blog - tend to point or to summarize or to collect material from elsewhere.
• Advocacy blog - pushing a particular point of view on a particular issue.
• Popular Mechanics blog - fascinating collection of information on how to do stuff.
• Exhibition blog - Vanity publishing, maintained by craftspeople, artists, writers.
• Gatewatcher blog - keep an eye on the media, gatekeepers.
• The diary - social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (taken over the function).
• The advertisement - commercial companies flogging a product.
• The news blog - break news.

I believe there are more other different and unique types of blog will arise in the future which in turn there may be a rise in that one type of blog may overlap the others based on their classification. Therefore, a more specific classification is needed for the ease of identifying and classifying them. Here, we can see that Simons's classifications are a lot more specific than Farrington's classifications. As such, it is more detailed and provides easy identification to various blog classifications.

References:

Smich, M 2010, Different types of blogs, myhosting, viewed 6 May 2011, <http://myhosting.com/blog/2010/04/types-blogs-2/>.

Farrington, R 2009, 'Different types of blogs', viewed 6 May 2011, <http://www.articlemonkeys.com/Different-Types-Of-Blogs-8430.html>.

Funnell, A & Davies, A 2008, 'A taxonomy of blogs', viewed 6 May 2011, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript>

Simons. M 2008, Towards a taxonomy of blogs, viewed on 5 May 2011, <http://www.apo.org.au/commentary/towards-taxonomy-blogs-0>.