Think of a blog as a thought-transmitter

For untold ages, mankind has struggled to communicate its ideas to a wider audience. From earliest history until now, most of the effort was spent on shaping the ideas to fit the communication media available.

Only now, with the recent convergence of the Internet and blogging tools, can a writer be struck with an idea and make that idea available to people on the other side of this planet within a matter of minutes.

The idea goes from the writer to a waiting reader and may be passed on to others in less time than it takes the writer to finish a cup of coffee.

Blogging frees your ideas from the restrictions of earlier publishing channels. Your ideas get spread faster and they can stay in a form that you use naturally. This allows you to communicate the original thought, with almost no alteration.

When you blog, you are literally sending your idea to the mind of the reader as fast as you can type and hit the publish button. You have become that 21st century phenomenon, the citizen publisher.

You are no longer limited by location, age, gender, race, or distance.

Your message is spread by the power of your ideas.

You don't have to mix paint to put on a cave wall. You don't have to worry about font selection, page layout or bookstore shelf space. You get an idea and want to share it, BAM!, it's out on the Internet and you are off on your next idea.

Multiply that activity a million times over and you can see why newspapers, magazines, and the entire traditional publishing world is facing a future that is mutating almost faster than they can react.

In the traditional world, the publishing channel and all of the hoorah that goes with it is the big story. Millions of writers have only a few tiny openings to push their ideas through. There are only so many column inches or shelf space to go around every day and the big problem is selecting whose work is published. A writer's work is selected when the publisher feels that it will make money for the publisher.

After it is selected, it will take months, sometimes a year, before it is available to the world. This publishing model is under increasing pressure from electronic media like blogs, video blogs, and podcasts, where ideas are created and published within a matter of hours.

One final point. Your electronic media publication can be located by a search engine. Your ideas become part of history as soon as you click on the publish button.

Comments

[Leslie]

All very good points. There's some power in that. It still amazes me when I get a hit from the Mid-East, or from China, Europe, South America. What do I have to say in my little corner of the Internet that interests someone so far away? Fascinating!

[Big Picture Guy]

Blogging provides numerous gifts. One is that it brings the world to your doorstep. The Small Office in my particular blog, for example, gets many visitors every day, some dropping in for a cup of coffee, others there to spend the time and take the full tour. They come from everywhere, including locales with evocative and exotic names like Maidenhead (England), Tauranga, Bay of Plenty (New Zealand) and More Og Romsdal (Norway). In our own back yard, you will find Savage (Minnesota) and Valhalla (New York).

The more your blog gains critical mass, the more people find your site through search engines like Google and search.msn. There are also the lesser known sources like Blue Yonder and Dogpile. And what is del.icio.us anyway?

It is oftimes amusing to see what key words were searched to have your blog pop up. Big Picture, Small Office is a narrative about the follies and foibles of life in a large company run by people with narrow points-of-view, short attention spans and tight budgets. Based on search words, however, visitors from Google and friends include more than those interested in corporate life. There are the animal lovers: ‘man bitten by black widow spider while filming National Geographic’ and ‘migration process of striped bass’; collectors: ‘pictograms by sitting bull’, ‘nude gearshift knobs’ and ‘mai tai rubber stamps’; as well as aficionados of haute couture: ‘people in oversized clothes’ and ‘operations strategies of boots in the past’. There are those visitors that do come close, however, like the one seeking out an ‘employee bragging wall’ and another looking for a ‘go fish employee morale booster’.

In a sense, blogging turns everyone’s site into a global village, one populated mostly - but not necessarily - by like-minded people. It is a gathering place, one to share a laugh, an idea, a story for the ages. Or maybe, just a cup of coffee.

[fletch]

Makes me wonder how many potentially great authors in the past died anonymously without their talents ever manifesting to the world, simply because they lacked the means, contacts, or resourcefulness to get published. Now they have no excuse. On the other hand, with millions of blogs, how many great writers are out there composing masterpieces daily but never noticed because of information overload and mass competition. Would we know and recognize a Hemingway today if he only wrote on a blog?
Would his work be diminished because it's not in a binding and it's free? Was his writing really that great to begin with or is it deemed great because competition was less in his time, he had a publisher, and you had to pay for the book?

[David St Lawrence]

I think that the higher bars for entry did not create better authors, they just created a selection process that the only well-connected or determined authors could navigate.

If the talent is there, I think it will be recognized and in today's Internet, the discovery of a new talent is an event worth celebrating and bloggers love to be the first to spread the word.

Take photography, for example. Ansel Adams was a great photographer, but I feel that there are photographers posting today who may have comparable talent. I am sure that I will see their pictures eventually because of the exposure available on the Internet.

[Rick]

There is also an ephemeral and haphazard quality to blogging. How will we find the good stuff other than by dumb luck? And how will we hold on to it and pass it on? Right now, we build communities of fellow bloggers. But there is a personal rate limiting factor. And there are millions of blogs. Chaos is great, but so is order.