[book review excerpt forthcoming from the ebr]

Diary: A diary is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date. It can be used for recording in advance of appointments and other planned activities, and/or for reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period.[i]

Blog: an online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the top of the page.[ii]

While the concepts of diary and blog may overlap they do not merge. Diaries are usually considered as personal spaces where a self-narrative authored by a single individual can evolve. Blogs, on the other hand, live online, thus are far from private. Typically the style is personal and informal and the content though updated frequently need not revolve around self-representation or expression. Additionally blogs need not be written by a one person; groups, organisations, classrooms etc…can take advantage of this kind of publishing forum. Although there are certain key differences between diaries and blogs, Vivian Serfaty has chosen to explore their shared ground. Rather than examining group blogging or the tracking of specific topics or activities through links and commentary contained in blogs, The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs focuses on those which are employed as ways of sharing personal narratives and life-writing. Furthermore, Serfaty applies this focus to discern more general affinities between “American civilization and diary writing” (1). Naturally, in order to provide such a focused discussion, Serfaty must disregard other aspects of blogging (community blogs, technical blogs, moblogs, newsblogs) but this seems to lead her to make sweeping generalizations likes: “the distinction between diaries and weblogs is increasingly meaningless, as one form seems to have morphed into the other” (22). However, Serfaty does discern a particular difference between print diaries and blogs which comes down to the software used: Weblogs are different inasmuch as the software is in charge of displaying readers’ answers; the blogger has very little scope for editing or deleting answers. Additionally, responding to an entry is usually not done through email but through a form located at the bottom of the page” (66).
[....]
The Mirror and the Veil refer to the “complex apparatus of the computer.” For Serfaty, the computer screen serves two simultaneous functions: “to conceal” (13) and to reflect, thereby allowing “diarists” to “write about their innermost feelings without fearing identification and humiliation” (13).
[...]
Blogs, like diaries, endorse expressive, open-ended, and non-linear versions of the self. They “can be seen as a means to think through the seam between the private and the public self, and as such, they are more attuned to contemporary uncertainties about the self” (29). For Serfaty, though, the crucial difference between print diaries and blogs is the possibility to receive feedback from readers: “where traditional diaries were written for an implied, ideal reader, online diaries explicitly search for an audience and in so doing, turn themselves into a collaborative project” (39–40).

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary/
[ii] http://www.blogscanada.ca/BlogDefinition.html