I’m finally getting around to reading Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook, and I’d like to quote her on one primary difference between weblogs and more traditional sites (at least back in the 90s and early 00’s):
The weblog points its visitors to other sites. Commercial websites spent years chating the mantra of “stickiness”: the ability to get visitors who came to their sites to stay there, even creating policies that prohibited the inclusion of external links anywhere on their sites. Weblogs have no such aspirations. Webloggers understand that people will regularly visit any website that reliably provides them with worthwhile content, even when that content is on another site. As counterintuitive as it may seem from an old-media perspective, weblogs attract regular readers precisely because they regulary point readers away. (9-10)
Can you imagine picking up an hard copy of the New York Times and reading, “Put this down this moment and pick up a copy of The New Yorker and read page 47″? I find this fascinating, this idea that blogs “reguarly point readers away” — I think it’s a testament to the obvious intertextuality of blogs, the way that texts are in conversation with each other, and at points, even blur together into one large text with many voices.
Blood, Rebecca. The Weblog Handbook: Practice Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Perseus, 2002.
