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10/10/2005: "The merits of different blogging platforms"

The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup - Part One of the Weblog Industry Report - Microcontent News, a Corante.com Microblog

THE MICROCONTENT NEWS WEBLOG INDUSTRY REPORT
Part One - Blogging Software Roundup
The word "weblog" is used so loosely these days that it's lost all meaning. This was really highlighted for me earlier this year, when I did a three-part interview with the authors of O'Reilly's Running Weblog with Slash.
After I published the piece, I noticed some indignation by bloggers over the Slashdot guys co-opting the word "weblog" in their book title. At first that struck me as strange - I've always thought of Slashdot as the "original" weblog. But at the same time, the word weblog seems to have been coined by a traditional blogger who publishes by hand using FTP.
Upon reflection, there are actually two distinct types of software that have a claim to the word "weblog":

Weblog Publishing: This software lets users generate and publish static webpages that aren't personalized for each user, a cheap way to serve a lot of pages. Blogger and Movable Type both fall in this category.

Weblog Community: This software automatically generates personalized dynamic webpages on the fly, which works better for community features like comments and moderation. Slash, pMachine, and LiveJournal fall into this category.