I stumbled upon this post by Alex Cristache at Blogsessive today called “Top 5 Reasons Why Blogging Rocked Our World”. His top five reasons are:
- Blogging gave us back “reading”
- Blogging gave us back “writing”
- Blogging gave us back “thinking”
- Blogging gave us back “evolution”
- Blogging gave us back “empathy”
It’s a good post and I suggest reading it, but I think one big thing was left out. Blogging has given us a way to connect with like-minded (and not so like-minded) people in a way that was not really available before (at least not in such a convenient and engaging format).
Consider what it was like before blogs. Communicating with people online was limited to what, email, IMs, forums, chatrooms, and newsgroups? As posted on Wikipedia, “Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with ‘threads.’”
Those were all fine, but blogs opened up a door for any average person to write about whatever they wanted to and most importantly have it read by others (feeds have played an important role in this as well). Subjects can be as broad as possible or as niche as the blogger dictates. And not only does that person get to have their thoughts read by others, they get to communicate with those people, and often as a result, relationships are born. Could this stuff have been done with other tools before? Sure, but not in such an appealing way.
So I don’t know if blogging gave us back communication and networking, but it made it better. Of course social networks have helped too.
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