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Via Rick Bruner, I read that American writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor has a blog.

Except he doesn’t.

Keillor’s “blog” is actually just a basic web page, built by some coder, with text presented in reverse chronological order. There are no permalinks whatsoever, only links to entire months’ worth of text. As we have written in our All About Blogs resource on what makes a blog:

The most important feature of the blog format are permanent links aka permalinks. So few people understand that permalinks are not just a ‘nice’ feature for a blog to have, they are a crucial element in what makes a blog a blog. The ability to permalink to an article is one of the two absolute pre-requisites for defining whether of not a site is a blog or is just a ‘blog-like website’ (the other feature being articles presented in reverse chronological order).

Without permalinks, it is very difficult for others interested in what you have written to link to it on their own blogs so that they can say what they think: permalinks facilitate discussion and dissemination. Without the ability to link to discreet articles and chunks of information via permalink, you do not get the network effect that makes blogging what it is.

This is basic stuff. Perhaps that is why Keillor’s column is only referred to as a blog in one place, and is entitled Garrison Keillor’s Travel Diary on the page itself. Maybe somebody realised that, whatever it is, it clearly ain’t a bloody blog.