To begin with, it’s disconcerting to see professional media persons who the public supposes to be sophisticated about such things, badly botch their internet taxonomy by labeling Perricone a “blogger” in their reporting. Do they not fact check these terms? I’m told Wikipedia is a popular TV journalist’s research tool. Let’s see what we find there.
A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log)[1] is a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often are themed on a single subject. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.)
Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.
Perricone didn’t operate a blog which is essentially an online diary of what the author considers to be pertinent events and/or recommended reading, preferably with an open comments section for reader feedback. Perricone, instead, was a frequent commenter under articles which appeared on a newspaper website. Those are both means of sharing information on the internet but there are technical differences in terminology which one may expect one’s grandmother.. or possibly Garland Robinette.. to accidentally conflate now and again but when professional news persons do it, one figures they should know better and wonders if they aren’t doing it on purpose.
Why is this important? Well aside from the professional journalistic imperative to get facts correct, misuse of terms in this manner serves to indict by association the entire practice of blogging, social networking, or using the internet for anything beyond mere consumption purposes as a somehow malevolent activity. Lumping all independent use of social media into the same category as newspaper commenters is reductive and deceptive.
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