• Merriam-Webster?s definition of a blog is ?a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks.?
• But this definition does not capture the true context of the blog.

• By way of analogy, consider a dictionary definition of a telephone: ?an instrument that converts voice and other sound signals into a form that can be transmitted to remote locations and that receives and reconverts waves into sound signals.?
• That?s fine if you already know what a telephone network is, but the definition doesn?t work on its own.

1. Just as telephones are meaningful only when connected to the telephone network, so
2. blogs are meaningful only when connected to the blog network.
3. Both are carriers of human communication.

a network,
a message-passing protocol,
nodes that
aggregate inputs and
produce outputs.

Its foundation network is the Web;
its protocol is RSS;
its nodes are bloggers, and
the input is action and/or information, while
the output is information or/and action.

The blog network is made of people.
We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge.

• More subtly, it can also help ensure that no vital inputs are suppressed because nobody has to rely on a single source.
• If one of the feeds I monitor doesn?t react to some event in a given domain, another probably will.
• When they all react, I know it was an especially important event.