The Blog CMM – Content Militation Model
The controversy on the definition of weblog/blog, whether it is by content or by format, started recently in the blog community. IMHO, it is meaningless to continue the discussion, as there are a variety of content, styles and format of CMS on the Internet. However we could not abandon the word “Blog”, since the style/content is obviously different from other CMS like portal site or web forum. So how could we define the word “Blog”? And how could we catagroize different kinds of content?
I prefer to define “blog” by format over content. It is because, every “blog” could have different topics on the same site, and there may exists some site with the same theme(I mean in content), so it’s hard to catagorize by content, like declaring all animals with horns are cows. In format, I would like to define as follows: A blog is a web site that is accessible by public interactively(so they could participate in discussion), has reproducible format on different topics(meaning that is a article post-view system), and are collaborated by one or more writers frequenly(team of editors I supposed), but unlike the forum, the list of writers are relatively smaller than the one on a forum, and a new member of the team needs authorization from the maintainer of the blog.
But some people may argue: It is sure that there are some differences between popular blog sites and personal diaries. So in the following I’m going to introduce a new concept to determine the nature of a blog by its target audience: The Blog Content Militation Model (borrowed from the acronym CMM in software engineering field orz)
The Blog CMM Catagory is to determine the user base/target audience for the blog on Internet. Disclaimer: It does not mean Blog CMM catagory 5 is better than Blog CMM catagory 1 or vice versa. It is just a model to compare a blog’s intended audience.
Catagory 1: Private
The blog’s content is targeted only to self or only a very small part of organization, especially to those who knows the writers in person. Most of the content of the blog are useless/unattractive to the general public. Examples of these blogs are diaries contains mostly “personal daily life stories”.
Catagory 2: Thoughtful
This kind of blog not only binded to daily lifes and adventures like Catagory 1, but go deeper to the topic of mind and philosophical subjects. The Cat. 2 Blogs has a merely larger intended audience, but part of the public may found uninteresting reading the writer’s thought.
Catagory 3: Topical
Blogs in Cat. 3 has a defined topic, no matter it is computing, news, animation, or even UFO. It is not considered whether the interest group is small or large: If the blog mainly contain articles with confined topic/topics(shared across members), it is considered as Cat. 3.
Catagory 4: Regional
Cat. 4 blogs have a more general theme on topics, but is confined to a local area such as a city, a company or a club. For example, a local community blog with local town news. Most of the time it will have a larger user base that those in Cat. 3(Exceptions I could think of is slashdot), but the audience is only confined to the organization member.
Catagory 5: General
Cat. 5 blogs’ toipcs are more general: It talks about every topic related to every one(or most of us will be interested in). For example, news, politics, funny stories, etc… Relatively Cat. 5 will have the largest audience, and may become popular across countries. Examples of this is BoingBoing.
The model above is not perfect, and you may find difficult to catagorize your blog site. Some blog site may be a mix of few models, like mixing your personal life(Cat. 1) with animation reviews(Cat. 3). But what it really shows is who is going to subscribe and read your blog. I think this may help people to decide the orientation of their blog site, and effectively maximize their user base.
