I Am Curious - Bagatellen

Al and I were talking yesterday evening about a recent publication – if I may call it that – of mine here at Bagatellen, and he re-iterated to me how he would prefer that longer pieces such as “I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart” or “Why Do We Care About Improvisation?” be presented as stand-alone HTML pages and not as blog entries per se. Al’s reasoning is that most of our readers have certain expectations about blog content, and are not necessarily going to be too thrilled once they click into posts that cause their browser scroll bar to shrink mightily.

But this got me to thinking. Is Bagatellen really a blog? It certainly isn’t a personal diary-like blog. It’s also not a daily newspaper or a weekly magazine. As a collaborative venture, I see Bagatellen as something more akin to an online journal, but with some of the peer review process laid bare – and open – for our readership; I know that this entity named “Bagatellen” isn’t a really meant to serve as a discussion board, yet it often does. True, we do have some content categories set-up, but some are firm (ROW, Interviews) where others are very loose (Op/Ed). My own opinion is the fact that we are using blog authoring tools to administer and organize the content we each individually decide is appropriate for Bagatellen is kind of beside the point. Then again, I also do not read or RSS many blogs on anything like a consistent basis. Still, aren’t we just capitalizing on the fact that the Movable Type software makes it simple to publish things on the web? Less coding; more instant gratification. (I suppose seeing one’s hot-linked name in a pale shade of grey is comparable to seeing one’s name in lights…) Myself, I can’t put format before the ideas format “contains”. And, for me, "blog" is not a genre -- though I do recognize that "blog" could be construed as a genre descriptor.

So I open the question to our readers, who I think probably have the most interesting things to say on the subject. Your experience of Bagatellen is a lot different than mine. How do you read us?