Blogs vs Databases: strange rambling
There's blogging about something, and then there is making online databases of things. I blog about things that happen to me, occasional purchases, experiences, books I read - but I am cataloguing my books with LibraryThing, and I add artwork to my website and occasionally blog about things when I do so (few and far between, I'm afraid). Sometimes there is overlap - people maintain a database and an accompanying blog in which they report every time they add significantly to the database.
I'm wondering how you decide between the two things for different purposes. It's not as if databases are necessarily static; in fact most are constantly being tweaked or added to. A database is not the same thing as a library. It also doesn't have much to do with whether people are interested or not: my book catalogue is probably boring to most people other than me, but then there are plenty of instances where a database is a regular source of interest for others, say a database of recipes. Of course there are also recipe blogs. So which is better? A blog is something you have to do regularly - keep checking back to see if something new has been added. This is incentive for people to return. On the other hand, you might just want a recipe for something specific and don't want to wait for it to arise, so you'd rather just search a database.
So I guess it depends mainly on one distinction: whether you want ever-present, static information on demand, or newsy, regularly-provided information determined by the blogger. I don't know which I prefer. I can enjoy spending a few hours reading the complete archive of a discontinued webcomic, but checking qc every day is also pleasurable.
All this talk of recipes is making me a) want to put all of mine online on the off chance I lose my recipe book/so I can share things easily, and b) hungry.