Me Pedia

原载 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html

节选了一部分翻译，感兴趣的可以参考。

What We’re Doing When We Blog
by Meg Hourihan
06/13/2002

每天似乎都会出现关于weblog的文章。。。。。。新名词，Warblog？ ：）
Every day it seems another article about weblogs appears in the press. At first, most of these stories seemed content to cover the personal nature of blogging. But more and more I’m seeing articles that attempt to examine the journalistic and punditry aspects of weblogs prominent in many of the so-called “warblogs,” or sites that began in response to the events of September 11th.

作者提到，有一种传统观点认为，“一般来讲，blog惯指个人的在线日记，典型的涉及内容包括爱人之间的问题或者技术新闻。但是9.11之后。。。。。。现在blog指对新闻加以评论的web“杂志”――他们经常对媒体加以指责，而且措辞通常都是rudely clever tones，这些杂志中也包含有证据支持其说法的文章的链接”。
“In general, ‘blog’ used to mean a personal online diary, typically concerned with boyfriend problems or techie news. But after September 11, a slew of new or refocused media junkie/political sites reshaped the entire Internet media landscape. Blog now refers to a Web journal that comments on the news — often by criticizing the media and usually in rudely clever tones — with links to stories that back up the commentary with evidence.”

作者认为，上面的说法“忘了更传统的关于weblog的定义――链接加评论”。
In her article, Catherine forgoes the more traditional weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary definition to carve out a new meaning for the word, limited to the type of blogs she reads. But Catherine’s analysis misses some of the very subtleties that distinguish weblogs from other writing. Rather than rant that Catherine just “doesn’t get it,” it seems to me that her article, and others that are similar, are perfect opportunities for the blogging community to talk about our own evolution.

Blog的共通性
Our Commonality
“如果我们透过blog的内容之下看的话，就能发现所有博客共有的一个基础――格式format。Weblog为给我们具有普遍的blog体验提供了一个框架，使我们的blog所联系的社会能与我们交互。否则web上的无数内容就无甚区别了。”
If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share — the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

“不论是每天工作的专业新闻记者式的warblogger，还是操心期末考试的十几岁的高中生，你做的事情都一样：使用blog链接到你的朋友和对手，对他们的作为发表评论。Blog比较短小，不拘礼节，有时会引起争论，有时非常个人――不论这些blog涉及哪些内容。Blog可以用谈话式的语调表现，不像正式的评论或演讲，一篇blog经常是一次讨论的开端，而不是一篇完整严密的讨论。”
Whether you’re a warblogger who works by day as a professional journalist or you’re a teenage high school student worried about your final exams, you do the same thing: you use your blog to link to your friends and rivals and comment on what they’re doing. Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach. They can be characterized by their conversational tone and unlike a more formal essay or speech, a blog post is often an opening to a discussion, rather than a full-fledged argument already arrived at.

“作为博客，我们经常更新和自己有关的内容。不同的博客，内容会各式各样。不过，因为是weblog，这些文章都经过排版，标明了发布时间并按发布时间逆序排列，读者可以很容易判断这个blog是否经常更新。通过在站点上放置email地址，或者为读者提供直接评论某篇blog的功能，我们可以让读者加入讨论。Email也会被经常加入并成为站点内容的一部分，这样就在blog的第一作者（创建者）和后继作者（发送email或者发表评论的读者）之间创造了一个近乎实时的交流通道。”
As bloggers, we update our sites frequently on the content that matters to us. Depending on the blogger, the content varies. But because it’s a weblog, formatted reverse-chronologically and time-stamped, a reader can expect it will be updated regularly. By placing our email addresses on our sites, or including features to allow readers to comment directly on a specific post, we allow our readers to join the conversation. Emails are often rapidly incorporated back into the site’s content, creating a nearly real-time communication channel between the blog’s primary author (its creator) and its secondary authors (the readers who email and comment).

“我们也通过工具联合起来，不论使用Blogger，LiveJournal，Radio UserLand，Movable Type，还是因为发自内心的热爱而自己制作的工具。博客们经常使用工具使其站点的出版工作更上一层楼。这些工具使我们各式各样的内容以相同的格式产出――文档，永久链接permalinks，时间戳和日期头。”
And we’re united by tools, whether we use Blogger, LiveJournal, Radio UserLand, Movable Type, or a custom job that’s a labor of love. Webloggers often use tools to facilitate the publication of their sites. These tools spit out our varied content in the same format — archives, permalinks, time stamps, and date headers.

A Native Format
When the Web began, the page was the de facto unit of measurement, and content was formatted accordingly. Online we don’t need to produce content of a certain length to meet physical page-size requirements. And as the Web has matured, we’ve developed our own native format for writing online, a format that moves beyond the page paradigm: The weblog, with its smaller, more concise, unit of measurement; and the post, which utilizes the medium to its best advantage by proffering frequent updates and richly hyperlinked text.

“。。。。。。weblog是一个自包含的专题单元。可以短到只有一个句子，也可以有多个段落。可以是多篇blog的融合――多篇不同主题的blog。。。。。。”
While a page usually contains one topic, or a portion of a single-topic item spans several pages (an opinion piece, an essay or column, a technical document, or press release), the weblog post is a self-contained topical unit. It can be as short as one sentence, or run for several paragraphs. And it’s the amalgamation of multiple posts — on varying topics — on a single page that distinguishes the weblog from its online ancestor, the home page.

“。。。。。。weblog的发布单元把作者从字数限制中解放出来。。。。。。”
Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of “page”), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

文章集合
The Posts Collection
“文章集合与传统的主页或者web页有何区别？首先，前者总是按时间逆序的。读者访问weblog的时候，总是在页面顶端看到最新消息。”
What distinguishes a collection of posts from a traditional home page or Web page? Primarily it’s the reverse-chronological order in which posts appear. When a reader visits a weblog, she is always confronted with the newest information at the top of the page.

Having the freshest information at the top of the page does a few things: as readers, it gives a sense of immediacy with no effort on our part. We don’t have to scan the page, looking for what’s new or what’s been changed. If content has been added since our last visit, it’s easy to see as soon as the page loads.

Additionally, the newest information at the top (coupled with its time stamps and sense of immediacy) sets the expectation of updates, an expectation reinforced by our return visits to see if there’s something new. Weblogs demonstrate that time is important by the very nature in which they present their information. As weblog readers, we respond with frequent visits, and we are rewarded with fresh content.

解析blog文章
The Anatomy of a Post

“一个blog可以通过下列独有特性加以鉴别：一个日期头，时间戳和永久链接permalink。通常作者名都出现在每篇文章后，特别是当一篇blog有多个作者完成时。如果允许评论，还会出现评论的链接。”
A weblog post can be identified by the following distinguishing characteristics: a date header, a time stamp, and a permalink. Oftentimes the author’s name appears beneath each post as well, especially if multiple authors are contributing to one blog. If commenting is enabled (giving the reader a form to respond to a specific post) a link to comment will also appear.

The Links
Links, and the accompanying commentary, have often been hailed as the distinguishing characteristic of a weblog. The linking that happens through blogging creates the connections that bind us. Commentary alone is the province of journals, diaries, and editorial pieces.

The Time Stamp
By its very presence, the time stamp connotes the sense of timely content; the implicit value of time to the weblog itself is apparent because the time is overtly stated on each post. Without the time stamp, the reader is unable to discern the author’s update pattern, or experience a moment of shared experience.

But if I visit your site at 4:02 p.m. and see you just updated at 3:55 p.m., it’s as if our packets crossed in the ether. You, the author, and I, the reader, were “there” at the same time — and this can create a powerful connection between us.

Moments of shared experience can be powerful connectors. They happen in the offline world when two strangers on the subway chuckle at the same funny billboard, and make eye contact as they do so. In the online world, they happen when I’m thinking about buying an iBook and I read on your blog that you’ve just bought one, at the same time.

永久链接
The Permalink

“永久链接permalink（指向一篇blog的永久位置的链接）在作者如何参与分布在其blog中的对话这个过程中扮演着关键角色。永久链接允许人们精确的对一篇blog加以引用，创造了一种方法使作者链接到他们响应的文章。”
The permalink (the link to the permanent location of the post in the blog’s archive) plays a critical role in how authors participate in distributed conversations across weblogs. The permalink allows for precise references, creating a way for authors to link to the specific piece of information to which they’re responding.

“如果你的blog有10篇新文章，4篇是关于cat的，只有1篇是关于Mozilla 1.0发布的，永久链接提供了让Mozilla博客引用确切文章的方法。。。。。。”
If your blog has ten current entries, four of which are about cats and only one of which is about the release of Mozilla 1.0, the permalink provides the means by which fellow Mozilla bloggers can reference the correct post, and in doing so, create a loosely-distributed Mozilla conversation. Without the permalink, the conversation is drowned out in a sea of irrelevant cat chatter.

沟通的演化
A Communication Evolution
“当我们谈论weblog的时候，我们在谈论一种组织信息的方法，与blog的主题无关。我们是否为博客并不在于我们写了些什么，而在于我们如何写。。。。。。”
When we talk about weblogs, we’re talking about a way of organizing information, independent of its topic. What we write about does not define us as bloggers; it’s how we write about it (frequently, ad nauseam, peppered with links).

Weblogs simply provide the framework, as haiku imposes order on words. The structure of the documents we’re creating enable us to build our social networks on top of it — the distributed conversations, the blog-rolling lists, and the friendships that begin online and are solidified over a “bloggers dinner” in the real world.

“作为博客，我们身处并享用着这场沟通的变革。上面提到的Weblog的特点可能会随着工具的改进和技术的成熟而变化前进。重要的是我们已经开始拥有一个不受纸张限制的，不受编辑干扰的，不受乏味的出版系统所拖累的媒介。就像言论自由本身，一个能让我们自由发表言论的系统比我们自由发表的言论更重要。”
As bloggers, we’re in the middle of, and enjoying, an evolution of communication. The traits of weblogs mentioned above will likely change and advance as our tools improve and our technology matures. What’s important is that we’ve embraced a medium free of the physical limitations of pages, intrusions of editors, and delays of tedious publishing systems. As with free speech itself, what we say isn’t as important as the system that enables us to say it.

Meg Hourihan，独立web咨询家，自由作家。《We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs》一书的合作者。
Meg Hourihan is an independent Web consultant and freelance writer. She is a co-author of the book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs.

Tags: Article, Blog