Danah Boyd, an expert on media and communication at Microsoft and NYU published her paper, “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium” in 2006. In the journal, Boyd discusses the finer points of what exactly a weblog or “blog” is and how the concept is still widely misunderstood and should be defined with more clarity. Boyd compares blogs to not online diaries or journals, but instead more to paper. What she means is that blogs don’t need to be defined by a certain type of “blogger” or any one type of writing. Instead, Boyd makes clear that blogs have many different purposes and don’t even have to be reserved for the written word.

By conceptualizing the blog as a medium instead of a genre, it is possible to see how blogs are more akin to paper than to diaries. It is not the conventions or content types that define blogs, but the framework in which people can express themselves. Using paper, people document their lives. The same is true in blogs. Using paper, people take notes. The same is true in blogs. Paper and blogs are used for everything from creating grocery lists to publishing innovative research, drawing pictures to advertising furniture for sale, tracking personal bills to writing gossip columns. Mediums are flexible, allowing all different sorts of expressions and constantly evolving.