I've been wondering when the day would come after Scoble left Microsoft that I'd disagree with him enough to bring it up here.  There have been many days that I've disagreed with him, but today is the day that I need to jump into the pool. 

Robert takes issue today with Live Spaces and how they call something a blog where the access is restricted.  It culminates in an entry today about What is a blog?.  He goes on to say how that he felt so strong about this that he put it in the book he "co-authored".

"I feel so strongly about this stuff that we put this into our book as a common definition of why Blogging is hot. If your tool or service doesn’t comply with all five of these things it might be very cool (and there might be a LOT of them) but you shouldn’t be able to claim that they are blogs."

Some pretty good comments in his post as well like this one from Eric Eggertson:

“But, I wrote the book and we put that definition in there and no one argued with it when it became the best-selling blogging book. So, too late to argue the definition now.”

Ah, what a crazy world it would be if the act of publishing something made it true!

It’s never too late to argue about the definition. Otherwise, why would you have posted this to your “blog” (if in fact it IS a blog)? If it was too late to argue about it, you wouldn’t have bothered.

Reading your disclaimer in the right margin, I see you don’t guarantee “the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here,” so I take that as an admission that you could be wrong. ;-)

And another by n00b:

“I wrote the book and we put that definition in there and no one argued with it when it became the best-selling blogging book. So, too late to argue the definition now.”

WOW. You should tape yourself saying that and play it back over and over just to hear what an incredible ass you sound like.

Out of the hundreds of millions of people on the internet, how many do you think care about your book?

Why don’t you put up a poll somewhere and ask if things can be a blog if they don’t meet your royal highness’s 5 aspects? Right now it looks like not even any of your own readers agrees with you, I’d place money on you getting taken to the cleaners if this were ever put to a vote.

Seriously Robert, get over yourself already. A blog that is private is still a blog. Sheesh..

technorati tags: Blogging, Scoble