I'm going to be talking about weblogs tonight, and wanted to provide a list of types. This isn't as easy as I thought.
I got a good start with Poynter, Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom (from 2002) and flew off the handle from there. Here is my list. I am sure there are other variants.
- Basic: link to something interesting, frequently with a comment as to why it is interesting (the traditional log of stuff on the web)
- Exposition: primary focus is writing, rather than linking to other interesting material (purists may not consider these blogs)
And then there are all the sub-genres that are either "basic" or "expository." Many blogs are combinations of styles, which makes identifying unique types difficult. Do you look at topic, style, format, audience?
- Topic: writing about a specific set of topics of interest to the author(s), such as politics, news, education, etc. Once the community of topic-bloggers gets big enough, they begin to self-identify (blogging lawyers are "blawgers").
- Linkblog: simplest variant of the basic blog with only links and no commentary, possibly becoming passe with some other social software tools (furl, del.icio.us, spurl)
- Group: variant of the basic blog with multiple authors
- Journals (diaries): generally of interest to friends and family, usually expository
- Family & friends: group + journal blogs set up to keep people in touch
- Photo: Graphic-centric blogs, frequently with photos posted directly from picture phones (moblog = mobile phone blog). Can also be based on artwork, cartoons, etc.
- Audio (Podcasting): owner posts frequent audio files of their commentary
- Event: Conference blog to build community and deliver information
- Book: Advertise and/or collaborate on upcoming an upcoming book
- PR: Public relations blogs, better than traditional press release spam
- k-logs: geared towards finding and sharing knowledge within a community. Discussion of this type of blog seems to have waned in the last year or so. Maybe the term was getting too obscure.
Another person made the simple differentiation of Subject vs. Personality or combined blogs. The wikipedia's entry on weblogs has a nice list of types as well, which separates out political and legal, which I would group under the "topic blog" category. In the education niche there are educator, learner and classroom blogs (via Aaron Campbell).