I just finished reading an interesting book about blogging, titled Who Let the Blogs Out, but a guy called Biz Stone. I’m still wondering what the name Biz might be short for, but regardless, I did find it quite an engaging read. Biz Stone was a very early blogger, was involved in created Xanga, has written a couple of books on the subject and now works at Google helping run Blogger. I guess that makes his opinions worth hearing, purely just based on his credentials.
The overriding message I took from his book was that the true worth of blogging cannot be appreciated on a small scale. A single blog post, or even a single blog, is not what it’s all about. Blogging gets it’s power from becoming a large scale ecosystem, a thriving community of people all cross linking to each other, creating connections and networks of ideas. The power of blogging is way more than the sum of its individual parts, and to gauge the power of this new medium it needs to be seen in the light of the much bigger picture that it creates.
He draws some good analogies, some of which coincidentally come from the last book I read before this one, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The point made in that book, in fact both books, is that groups of people can be collectively smarter than the brightest individuals within the group, if the group is made up of diverse individuals with a broad range of views, supported by a medium that allows them to communicate freely.
Sounds like blogging to me.