Dr. Danah Boyd, a scholar on media communications and “other intersections between technology and society,” as well as a contributor to the development of Blogger, notes that Internet platforms which furnish blogging tools have set the formal definitions for blogging. For most Internet cruisers, “blog” is a term synonymous with the concept of “public journaling.” For Internet hackers and content producers, however, the concept and cultivation of blogging swells beyond digitally aggregating one’s solipsistic purging. Dr. Boyd attributes the wider association of blogs as public diaries to platforms, such as Blogger, which garnered users by defining the purpose, practice, and culture of blogging as means “offering you instant communication power by letting you post your thoughts to the web whenever the urge strikes.” (Excerpted from Dr. Boyd’s paper, “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium.”) Blogs are, foremost and historically, generated through the desire to communicate, share, and express. True to the nature of phenomenons, blogs represent an episode in the evolution of human communication that wildly bridges private self-expression and public broadcasting. As Carl, a representative of Dr. Boyd’s interviewees, remarks about the misrepresentation of the elusive satisfaction, meaning, and culture of blogging:

I’ve given up on definitional questions and gone for these tautologies. Like blogging is what we do when we say, “We’re blogging.” And not worried much about what’s a blog, and what’ s a journal, and what’ s a whatever, link log, and a photo blog, and whatever. I think that they’re not particularly meaningful categories. … It’s a blog because a blogger’ s doing it. It’s a blog because it’s caught up in the practice of blogging. It’s a blog because it’s made on blog tools. It’s a blog because it’s made up out of blog parts. It’s a blog because bloggers are engaged with it, and everyone points at it and says, “It’ s a blog!”

At its most credible, blogging is “amateur journalism” and at its least, public diary-keeping. Weblogs differ from homepages due to their particular aesthetics and purposes, and have very different sociable, communicative effects. They are founded by a diversity of intentions and inconsistent in their ends and output. Thus, to understand blogs requires the practice of blogging. Dr. Boyd’s work ultimately determines that evaluating the culture of blogging has been complicated by the fact that a blog is both the product and the medium, and of course further convoluted by its misrepresentation as a public diary platform. Dr. Boyd’s beef with media and many scholars’ metaphoric definition of blogging is defensive of the cultural values of blog authors, and appreciative of the medium’s phenomenal representation as as an independent, uncontrolled, expressive media outlets.

Dr. Boyd, thrusting from another cited researcher, McLuhan, explains that “a medium is defined by what it enables and how it supports people to move beyond the limitations of their body.” Ultimately, and definitively, blogging is a framework for bloggers’ self-expression, whether individual (as with most blogs) or collaborative (as with blogs that aggregate posts around a theme or collective purpose, such as The Huffington Post). In this way, blogging is a bi-product of the Internet and the human drive for expression. “The medium is defined by the practice it supports and the ways in which one identifies with that practice.” The medium will ultimately absorb its metaphoric confinements, as the interviewee reported to Dr. Boyd, “Blogging is what we do when we say ‘We’re blogging.'”