| David Armano's blog post, Kill your Website, suggests that traditional websites have become obsolete and can be replaced by a blog. I began writing a comment on the post, but found that what I wanted to say exceeded the blog's allowed comment length. So, here is what I would have left as a comment…  David, this post brings back memories of an issue that came up during a panel discussion at one of the first "Business Blogging" conferences in Boston, 2003. Everyone (the panel and the audience) was debating the definition of a "blog".
Is it a blog if posts are not in reverse chronological order? What if it has multiple authors? What if posts are edited by someone other than the author? What if posts are not dated? What if it does not offer RSS? Must it have a first person voice? And on and on, ad nauseum. In fact, the very notion of "business" blogging was downright blasphemous to many of the early grass roots bloggers who believed that evil corporations and marketers were swooping in like demons to co-opt their sacred personal publishing platforms. At the time, I found the whole debate rather missing the crucial point. You could call the technology "bakin' a cake" (to paraphrase Norm McDonald) as long as it had discrete information objects, organized into channels, and transformable into different presentations. The crucial point was that we had a new platform technology and that (like it or not), this platform was going to be leveraged in many ways by businesses.  The bottom line is that a blog is a "web lego". So are static web pages, PDFs, lead capture forms, flash apps, e-commerce apps, RSS feeds, podcasts, discussion forums, and others. Most recently, we've seen the rise of many social media technologies—Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Technorati, etc.—more web legos.
Coming from this mindset, I believe “website vs. blogsite” is a false choice just as is “blogsite vs. Twitter,” “website vs. forum,” etc. It’s like building an actual Lego® project and asking, “Should I use the 2x4 white bricks or the 1x6 yellow bricks?” The answer is, of course, it depends on what you’re trying to build. I work mainly with SMB clients and find that most need elements of a (traditional) website along with multiple blog channels. The real question is, “What are we trying to build?” Only then can we start to select the right web legos. | 
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