As different people blog for different reasons, they also create different types of blogs. The type of blog they create will depend on whether they are blogging for business or pleasure, to inform a specific group on a particular topic, or to talk about what they had for breakfast. Different types of blogs are aimed at different audiences, or different parts of an audience’s interest. Some examples include:

Often shunned by traditionalists because they are rarely link-driven, personal blogs are a way of communicating with friends and strangers alike about what is happening in your life. Reading them may be voyeuristic, but they can be fascinating and range anywhere from librarians discussing crazy patrons (malelibrarian.blogspot.com), to celebrities discussing their lives and interests (wilwheaton.net), to teenage girls in California complaining about their hair (hit “random” on Livejournal.com. You’ll find something.)

Not only entertaining and useful forms of personal communication, personal blogs often disseminate useful information. Reading librarian blogs can give one ideas about how to deal with patrons at the reference desk. Travel tips can be picked up by reading blogs written by people currently visiting places you would like to see. Information about life in places you would like to live can be picked up by reading blogs written by people in those places (like my current obsession, Antarctica, as described by Beth Bartel’s Iceblog). Just because a blog is personal does not make it irrelevant to those who do not know the author.

There are plenty of blogs that mention the news, but a few focus on it alone. The advantage of these is that they “pre-filter” news from a variety of sources, sometimes creating a more balanced view than mainstream news outlets. News blogs allow busy people to keep up with the news without searching several sites.

News blogs include: Metafilter.com, taking news from a wide-variety of sources and providing it in a free, community-oriented atmosphere, and Blogcritics.com, an arts and technology news blog written by 217 authors working for free (12).

A subset of news blogs, war blogs provide pre-filtered war stories from around the world. Due to their highly political nature, war blogs are often aimed at a very specific audience. For example, the pro-war National Security Blog and the anti-war No War Blog.

Howard Dean’s blog was both a step towards the affirmation of blogs as a “serious” form of publication, and a great way to reach younger or more technically-minded members of his audience. George Bush now also has a blog, keeping interested readers up to date on where he is and what happened on that day in American history. On our side of the border, Paul Martin keeps a blog, though it hasn’t been updated since October 2003. With an election coming up, this might be a good time for him to get blogging again!

Tech blogs are usually link-driven and have a very specific focus, filtering their content appropriately. In doing this, tech blogs provide news that is important to their readers in a quick and easy to read format. For example, Slashdot provides Open-Source computing news (“News for Nerds”) while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Microsoft blog provides daily updates of Microsoft news.

Organizations might use blogging technology to their advantage by implementing a blog on their Intranet, providing a FAQ, or discussing conference presentations. This is where libraries and librarians often come into play. The possibilities for using blogs in organizations have not yet been fully realized. However, organizations are traditionally somewhat slow to react, and as blog technology becomes more accepted through use by the media and popular figures, organizations will likely recognize the advantages and implement more blog solutions.