Categories: Blogs vs. News

There is an ongoing debate these days about whether bloggers are journalists and whether blogs are news sources. This is further muddied by journalists who blog, bloggers that don't merely refer to media news sources but do their own investigative reporting, and news sites that are little more than aggregated, filtered and organized collections of blog postings. This is all very interesting, but not an issue that I deeply care about. My problem is more mundane: how can I best organize my browser bookmarks.

There was a time when I clearly viewed blogs and traditional media sources are distinct things. To deal with that, it was enough to create separate bookmark folders for blogs and news sites, further categorized by my business and personal interests. As time went on, this distinction came to make less and less sense. My bookmarking behaviour in response to this was a bit haphazard, resulting in an unpredictable mix of blog and news sites within various folders and categories. It got so bad that I could sometimes not predict in which folder I might find a particular bookmark or, for new bookmarks, decide where to file them. This is confusing enough that I often see the same thing in Yahoo! stock summaries, where they, too, have separate categories for news and blogs pertaining to a stock, yet it is often unpredictable in which category any particular article will appear.

This past week I decided (as I will explain) that the distinction was no longer sufficient to justify keeping these bookmarks separate. I reorganized my bookmarks by interest category, and within those categories I order all bookmarks by importance or frequency of use. That is, blogs are no longer a category. After having made this change, my bookmarks seem far more natural and easier to navigate. Since I use Firefox, I can circumvent categories completely for bookmarks and RSS feeds that are of high importance, by placing them on the bookmarks toolbar for one-click access.

Apart from making my time in front on my computer(s) a bit less stressful, this matter evokes a deeper question about just what it is that sets blogs apart from the web properties of old and new media enterprises. Blogs, especially those operated by an individual, are typically dedicated to a particular topic, with posts shown in reverse chronological order. While there is the ability to organize posts by blogger-defined categories, the more common technique used is tags: search on a tag, and you see the posts within that category. Tags are also handy for blog search engines and aggregators, so that they only pick up pertinent articles, or at least better organize them. In contrast, news sites use editorial control (human or automated) to categorize articles and present these categorized lists on their front pages.

Of course, it isn't quite as simple as I've presented. News sites, including many blog aggregators, provide both a descending chronological list of the most recent or important articles in addition to categories (example: Globe and Mail). News sites, like blogs, also provide RSS feeds that are similarly presented in reverse chronological order. I believe what this demonstrates is that blogs and news sites are increasing converging to a small set of presentation methods, and that they are doing so because that is what works best for readers. As the blogs vs. news matter continues to evolve, I expect that this convergence will continue.

Most importantly, this means my bookmarking woes should eventually come to an end. This assumes that my interests and, therefore, bookmark categories, remain stable. Unfortunately (or, fortunately) my interests change over time, and so I can never completely escape periodic reorganizations.