This is a quick and easy one, but it’s been bothering me slightly recently that the two are getting mixed up when they are distinct things.

A blog is a whole entity, like Libroediting or Libro Full Time (why not plug my own two!) or, now I come to think of it, my book review blog (I’m just shameless, aren’t I!). It’s a collection of blog posts, or articles, like a book is a collection of chapters or a magazine or newspaper is a collection of articles. The container, if you like.

A blog post is one of those individual articles or chapters. It’s a piece of content that’s contained in the container of the blog. This is a blog post, and part of a blog.

I’m not sure where the confusion has crept in, but it has … so people say “I’ve written a new blog today” or “I’m writing one blog a week this week”, when of course they don’t mean that they’re starting up a whole new set of articles, a new container; they mean they’re writing a blog post. I thought for a while that it was all about getting things written in as short a space as possible – Twitter syndrome – but “I  have written a post about discrete vs. discreet” takes up the same room as “I have written a blog about discrete vs. discreet”, so it can’t  be that.

The act of writing and publishing blog posts is, of course, blogging. But you’re still writing blog posts in particular, or a blog in general.

Thank you for your attention to this matter! You’ll have to excuse me the odd, small rant: just trying to keep things accurate and descriptive and doing my bit to preserve the finer grain of our language.

You can find more troublesome pairs here and the index to them all so far is here.