When Is A Blog No Longer A Blog?

In my Why I Allow Comments On My Blog post, I said that a blog that doesn’t allow comments is no longer a blog. Markus Frind of Plenty of Fish fame is asking if some of those blogs listed by Business Week should even be call blogs. In his recent blog post, Markus contends:

The article talks about “bloggers” making millions online. Funny part is few of these people actually qualify as “bloggers”. Shoemoney somehow made the list, even though only 3% of his income comes from his blog. Others mentioned like Techcrunch, boingboing, talkingpointsmemo, perezhilton etc aren’t blogs, they are media properties with lots of employees.

What Markus seems to be getting at is you’re only a blog if you’re a one-man operation and do everything yourself. In other words, you stay small. If your blog become super popular to the point where you need to hire a CEO to help run it (as TechCrunch did), you are no longer a blog. Instead, you are a media company.

While I agree that the TechCrunch network is a media company, I believe that TechCrunch itself is still a blog. TTZ Media Inc. owns John Chow dot Com. TTZ Media is a media company but John Chow dot Com is still a blog. How many people a blog employs shouldn’t be a factor on whether it’s a blog or not.

Flipping this around, I can ask Markus the question, is a dating site with one employee really a dating site? 🙂

What do you think? When is a blog no longer a blog?