Long time no blog...

So, apparently trying that blogging thing didn't work so well in the last several months of chaos. So, I think we're back to a variation of the same question:

Why blog?

RecruiterGuy says blogging fascinates [him] more because of what he reads rather than what he types. He likes finding the interesting and normal posts about normal and interesting people. My spouse, who is a professional writer, recently started blogging because, with an audience, there is an expectation of content, so she just has to write it. The New York Times says, "Reason No. 92: Book deal," due to some blog authors landing book contracts based on the subject of their blogs. Some time ago when professional blogging wasn't the norm, Fredrik Wackå spent a few months talking about why companies should blog.

As many people know, I am interested in things related to communication, knowledge sharing, and various types of media. Blogging is a natural fit in amongst those topics, as it is a form of sharing knowledge through intentional communication, using various types of media - though all web delivered content. Blogging can be more a conversation with the reader than more traditional forms of written work - even other styles of web/net content. The tools we have today allow us to create blog posts as responses to other web content, especially other blog posts. For example, this post uses trackbacks to the sites it references. That means those sites, if they use trackback technology, now know that this post references them. It is the only way to automatically tell another site that you point at them, and it can be a rather powerful tool in furthering our global conversation. This is what the Blogosphere is all about. Purportedly, Brad L. Graham, on his Must See HTTP:// blog, coined the term Blogosphere in his September 10, 1999 post. Now it is a fairly common word to describe this interactive and sometimes navel gazing nature of blogs that we all seems to love (or hate, depending on the blog's content). In looking at how we can share more knowledge, communicate with more people of both similar and dissimilar viewpoints, and leverage our technology and global community to improve our lives, blogs are the personal conversation compared with the formal discourse of traditional news and industry or trade journals. Instead of responding to an article with an opinion piece in another newspaper or a letter to the editor posted to a web site, we can immediately respond on a personal and/or professional level, with full attribution for any source material as we would in any reputable paper or article. We can even reference less formally, yet more accurately, because we can send our readers directly to the other source, not just describe it so they can find it as we have to do in MLA, APA, and other reference rules.

So, have we answered the question: Why blog?

Yes. No. Maybe.

Yes, because we know that as humans we must converse with others to expand our knowledge and learn from viewpoints we do not already have. A global conversation can be as powerful (or more) than a local or regional conversation. It is certainly more powerful than not even having the first half of the conversation with a blog post.

No, because there are a myriad of personal reasons why people blog, and I've barely even touched on the non-personal and esoteric reasons to blog. There are so many reasons driven by emotion, circumstance, a desire to heal (oneself or others), a need to write, a requirement for employment, or research. There are as many reasons to blog as there are to write in the first place, but there is the added complexity of the asynchronous conversation with complete strangers, colleagues, friends, and family.

Maybe, because not everyone likes writing, or even reading, blogs. I certainly have intimated some reasons I find interesting or compelling for blogging, but have I disclosed why I blog? Not entirely, and certainly not directly.

Perhaps I just want start a conversation and seed it with some musings of mine and others.

Hopefully this won't be a one-sided conversation.