I agree with Kent that the discussion about what one person thinks is/not blogging: “who cares?“, but I would be curious to know what Scoble thinks of beach blogging?

C’mon Robert, didn’t you know sand crabs can read RSS? Sterling beach blogs that he is with the program, sand scooper in hand, so help him out. And go ahead and reuse the title: beach blogging. We might give MSN Live Spaces a run for their beach money.

Product Manager for MSN Live Spaces Mike Torres sums it up pretty well with:

Me: I really don’t care what people think the word blog means. I just want people to have tools that allow them to communicate with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Not everyone wants to be “famous”, so it’s important that these tools promote privacy, safety, and control to the meet everyone’s unique needs - and that they aren’t limited to text, but incorporate other types of media as well. Call it a blog or don’t. Whatever.

Real complaints about MSN Live Spaces
What I do want to complain about with MSN Live Spaces — and I hope Mike, Dare and others are reading — is the number of times they’ve changed the freaking location of my blog. By my count we are on Spaces location change #4. At least they could make it so we could use our own domains and be done with this redirect madness. No more location changes please.

Also permalinks that look like this:
tdavid.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8E515242F8EFD787!464.entry

Really, why the need for encoded, meaningless URLs? Dates would be fine with an ID number for the post. What’s the need for the encoding when you already have a subdomain? Shorter is better, folks, otherwise people run to URL shorterning services. That is less juice for you, less juice for the bloggers, capiche?

Lastly, the trackback system. Does it work with Wordpress yet? Every time I’ve tested in the past (and testing again now) the trackbacks never showed up. Yes, I have it checked to “Allow trackbacks from any public website” but it doesn’t work. Checking the admin area again (where oh where is my .NET passport ID …)

In all fairness, the Spaces team has been consistent that Spaces intended audience is for the non-geeks. It’s meant for your aunt and uncle, your grandparents, people who don’t eat, sleep and breath computers. Certainly not peeps like Scoble, myself or most Hmm readers. Nothing wrong with being in either camp. Scoble has already changed his mind and admitted he was wrong about blogging which he credits to Stowe Boyd’s pensive post.

The problem with renaming and redefining things are it creates confusion for non-geeks and geeks. What’s the popular definition of a ‘blog’ this week? I can’t tell you. This reminds me a bit of when Amazon released an author/reader program and a Clickz writer called it a blog system, which even Amazon seemed to dispute.

So what the heck is a blog anyway?
I think most people would agree today that a blog is text prepared and published written in a diary format: dates, times and permalinks and syndicated in XML (RSS). It can or cannot have comments or trackbacks. It can or cannot be publically accessible. It can be hosted by the writer, publisher or some other third party, related or unrelated. It can be updated frequently or infrequently.

It is these discussions — and in most of them people are being serious (I’m mostly not on this topic) — that make me think the whole ‘blog’ thing is going to die someday and be replaced by something else more trendy. It’s like bell bottom pants, disco balls, karaoke, hair metal.

What was so uncool about diary?

In fact, I prefer to call this magic thing we are doing ‘writing’ rather than blogging. I wince when people refer to me as a ‘blogger’ and have to catch myself doing that. I’m not a blogger, I’m a writer who chooses to write in this particular place on the web in a diary format. You and I might call this many things over the years. Right now the term is blogging, fine, I’ll roll with that. In 2016? Who knows.

In the meantime, writing can be done in an email, IM, painted on a canvas or, hey, how about written in the sand? Somebody link in with a picture of an RSS icon beach blogged.

• Beach blogging
• Nature’s Eraser
• MSN Spaces adds Amazon monetization option and more
• MSN spaces out in the blogosphere (BETA)
• Answering “What is trackback?”
• AOL to release blogging tools later this year