All this sturm und drang over a presidential endorsement on a PR blog needs to be put into perspective. Now we’ve got bloggers taking sides over who’s right and who’s wrong. A comment on this blog asserts “There are no hard and fast rules with blogging, to be sure. That said, the only thing you have to talk about is what you want to talk about.” Therein lies the problem.

The anything-goes definition is fine if your blog is a personal journal and you decide that it’s about whatever you want to talk about. But when you get right down to the core of the issue, a blog is any content published using a blog server application that produces ordered content. Blogging software is nothing more than a sort of mini-content management system. The fact that most people use it to produce personal journals is fine. In fact, it’s great. Every new software starts somewhere. Businesses once dismissed instant messaging as a teenager’s toy; today half the workers in America use it.

But part of the problem with PR’s adoption of any technology has been a fascination with the tactic and no focus on its strategic potential. So it goes that the only way most practitioners view a blog is just as a personal journal. Of course, there are always a few who stretch beyond the initial uses. Consider some of these blogs:

• Over at SearchEngineWatch, the monthly e-mail newsletter has given way to a blog because the news can be delivered faster that way. They call it a blog, but they don’t have to. They could just call it “Latest News.”
• ExpertPR is a Bacon’s blog that keeps media professionals up to date on moves by reporters and industry news.
• Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion reports that Dan Forbush has turned ProfNet’s Media Insider into a blog.
• Clip ‘N Seal has introduced a brand-focused blog that nowhere uses the word blog, just “Fresh News.” (Thanks, Neville, for pointing this one out.)

In none of these cases do the authors use these blogs as forums to talk about whatever they feel like talking about. Their purpose is clear. They’re leveraging the technology to do a better job of communicating specific content to a targeted audience for well-thought-out reasons.

That, I believe, is where blogs are headed. (Keep in mind that my audiences were skeptical when I talked about the potential for e-mail, the Web and instant messaging—and I’ve been promoting blogs as a communication tool since early in 2002.)

To suggest that a blog is whatever you want it to be is like saying a Web site is whatever you want it to be. That’s true, but once you define it as a corporate site, is it okay to add a streaming porn video because, hey, it’s a Web site and by definition you can publish anything to a Web site you want to? Remember the days when everybody gushed about their Web sites? “We’ve launched a Web site, so now we’re cool!” It didn’t matter that the site had no worthwhile content; all that mattered is that the company was cranking out some HTML with the company logo and some brochureware. The site was usually called something like, “Acme, Inc.‘s Web site.”

That’s how we’re talking about—and applying—blogs today. We’re at the same stage with blogs that we were at with the Web in 1995, and it’s depressing.

To limit the definition of a blog to “whatever you want it to be” is incredibly narrow thinking. There will no doubt always be personal journals, just as there will always be personal Web sites (my wife has one), but we should move beyond the point of limiting our vision for blogs’ potential to just individual diaries. The potential is much greater than that.  As communication counselors, we need to be able to explore what blogs can do for our clients without confining our ideas to the current nascent application of blogs. If CEO personal journals (why not a CEO column or a CEO update that uses blogging software?) and product blogs are the best we can do, somebody else is bound to help organizations communicate more effectively with this tool and leave PR in the dust once again.

But what the hell. PR as a profession was behind the curve on desktop publishing, e-mail, the Web, online collaboration, and every other new technology to come down the pike. There’s no reason to believe we will be any swifter with blogs.