Blog

A blog (or weblog) is a diary-like website (see net jargon) that allows anyone (or almost anyone) to write a new webpage or add links.

This makes it good for discussion—if someone writes something that isn't right, it can be corrected (but not changed as in a wiki). This assumes that people are in general interested in discussions and forming a community of those who can agree on something that they can then advocate to other people.

It also means that those who have one point of view not widely shared by others can come back again and again and keep making the same argument over and over again, flame people. All of this remains visible to everyone, and it is not common to remove a page.

In practice, a blog almost always shrinks to a small creative network of people who know and trust each other, and who a larger social network wants to read about. Some blogs have scoring of posts that reinforces this network even more, so that those who are disagreed with, will become invisible.

Some experts think a blog has a power structure like that inside a political party, where a clique will dominate discussions by choosing when someone has "won" an argument, and when some matter is "decided".

Contrast: wiki, crit, email list