Early in the semester, we asked the question 'What is a blog?' John McCain has a definitive answer. In a new and frightening piece of legislation a blog is defined as "any site that allows comments, authors and personal profiles." His bill proposes that blog sites be responsible for all content in their comments and user profiles. Its ostensible purpose is to curb the distribution of child pornography, but in reality its effects will be much more wide-ranging. Blogs are required to report any illegal images or videos that are posted or face stiff fines. Bloggers will have to police themselves, and since they may not know whether an image is copyrighted or "legal" some might have to shut down rather than risk paying the huge fines.

I'm feeling a bit lost regarding what we want this blog to be. The Writing Machines Blog. So far it seems to be of the fubu, for us by us, variety. Which is fine. We trade links we feel will pertain to the class and stimulate discussion. We probe and comment on the assigned readings. We reference one another.

I guess what I'm confused about is whether blogs owe something to the general public. They are open forums. On the remote chance that some random individual stumbles upon the Writing Machines blog is it our duty as bloggers to try to interest them in the content? To give them something that will make them want to read more, and maybe even link to us? I'm so used to public literature that does this. In every creative writing and journalism class I've taken the primary focus has been on engaging and holding the interest of the reader. There's a relationship between writer and reader. When you publish something you want your audience to read and enjoy it, so you try to make it readable and enjoyable. The blogs linked to(blogroll) on this page all do that. They have humor, or continuous narrative, or subject matter that appeals to either the general or a niche audience, or some hook to keep readers coming back for more.

One of the things about blogs--they have those dated entries. So the short of it is, I saw a rather old bus ad today, and wasn't paying attention to the advertising world last January when this was first launched as I learned from said dated blogs, but I still think it's interesting the at&t had a whole campaign that was "blogging delivered." And then for a while, their website had no results when one searched "blog," creating condescending hoopla, as well as confused hoopla. They've since remedied the situation with this rather fluffy article.

I confess that I am not a frequent flier in the blogosphere (and I promise never to write a phrase that bad again), but one blog that my friends often link to on their AIM away messages-- an illustrious place, I know-- is Fafblog. It's a liberal blog that makes fun of those on the far Right, but what distinguishes it from the hundreds of other liberal political blogs out there is its bizarre, fanciful sense of humor. I read it more for the amusing randomness than for the political commentary, although I also generally like seeing the people they make fun of being ridiculed.

I'm basically completely new to the world of blogs, so it's been a fun yet oddly tiring thing for me to search and read all sorts of blogs in an attempt to learn about them. The more I read, the more complicated my definition of "blog" becomes. Though I'm not a photographer myself, I love looking at photographs, and one blog I found and really like is Photoblogs. It makes me wonder, though, how much sites like these--with more photographs than text, or even no photographs--are considered true blogs. (I guess a similar site is the one marmalade posted called Postsecret.)