Private Blogs

Robert Scoble has been talking about blogs, and has an issue over whether private blogs (or blogs with no entries) are actual Blogs… Yes? No? Maybe, so?

From the public point of view a Blog is often explained via the use of the words Web Log. Logs in general can be as private or as public as anyone wants, so why should a Web Log be any different?

And at what stage does a blog become a (Private Log, Scoble’s creation) plog? A Spaces blog might not be accessible by you, but could be easily accessible by friends of the person who writes the blog. In theory, it might be accessible by everyone but you (very large friends list). Is it still private? Or is it only private when it isn’t being shared with anyone at all?

And where does this lead private or friends-only entries in a blog? LiveJournal have the ability to set the read permissions by entry, so maybe it’s just that the user hasn’t posted a "public" entry yet, but has posted 4 friends-only entries every day since they started. Are these blogs private because they have a few private entries? Or are they still public?

The line between public and private is a thin one at best and for what it’s worth I’m not really decided on the issue of whether Blogs can be private or not. What would we be saying if they’d just been called "Online Diarys" from the start? And what if they’d been called "Amatuer news columns"? People use them as both, so which is it? Where does Blogging fit in?