A real blog...

I've been having a hard time trying to keep up with my blog. The only posts I've had have been class assignments but those don't really count. Recently I've been trying to find interesting blogs that could give me some kind of inspiration for this one. This search has brought up a question I had pertaining to blogs and what exactly makes a blog, a blog. 

Searching websites I've come across some that feature large community posting sites and located in the heading it will have a link saying "blog." Does that constitute as an actual blog or is it just someone throwing a fancy title on something it truly isn't?

On other sites like Facebook and Myspace you can post your thoughts on your own page and I've found many people like to call that a blog. On Myspace at the top of everyone's personal page it has a thing saying, "[Blank's] blog." I've written my fair share of posts on my Myspace page so was I technically a blogger before I started this page I can't seem to manage?

Can anyone tell me what makes up a blog? Are their certain things it needs to have to be considered real?

Links.

After half a centruy of scholarly work, new documents about the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have been made public.

"Certainly, after 50 years, the unique historical value of these records outweighs any secrecy rationale," said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, which filed the petition, with support from more than a dozen scholars. The archive, based at George Washington University, is a nonprofit group that uses the Freedom of Information Act to challenge government secrecy.

Among the historians were John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale, and Ronald Radosh, adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and past president of the Historians of American Communism.

Blogging minutes.

With so many aspects of news and reporting being affected by blogging nowadays it's no wonder it's becoming increasingly popular. After reading/looking over the survey of US journalists by Bordeur it shows how blogs are having an impact on our little world of reporting.

Going back then and thinking about the 11 layers and citizen journalism, it's funny to think that blogging wasn't really looked  at as a means of reporting, yet so many "real" reporters are out there reading over all these blogs in cyberspace.

It's also interesting to me that this survey talks about the hours reporters spend looking over other people's blogs, collecting information, gathering story ideas and getting soundbites... And then there are people like me who can't even remember to log on to their own assigned blog and do an assignment that takes 20 minutes.