It's amazing, given all the ways blogs have been sliced up in the last decade, that the word still means anything and there's anyone doing it. Think about it.
Twitter said a blog post was 140 characters and had no title.
Google Reader said a blog post has a title, and contains full text, unlimited in length.
The NY Times (and other journalists) say reporters are bloggers.
Between these three very powerful authorities, each pushing blogging in a different direction without regard to the others, and without regard to the people who do it, there was almost nothing left for blogging to be.
You can see that in the evolution of my blog, Scripting News. Before Google Reader and Twitter it was a mix of short title-less items, and longer essays, some with comments others without.
Look at the archive page for March 2001 for an idea. (I picked that month at random.)
With the demise of Google Reader, I finally decided I'd had enough of being pushed around, and went back to the mixed format, which caused some trouble with the successors to Google Reader, but I decided not to care.
Now with the NYT dropping the pretense they are blogging, we've gotten rid of another slice. And Twitter, could help us out by dropping the 140-char limit and go ahead and let readers have the full text of blog posts in-line, without leaving Twitter. I really don't see any harm in it, and I wonder why it's taking so long to take this fairly obvious step.
Blogging started as a very irreverent thing. If it's going to be anything as we go forward, we have to stop caring what other entities think we are and focus on what we think we are.
PS: This post is a followup to the earlier I know what a blog is.