Blogging: This Thing We Do

Recently, I was chatting with someone about a business forum they attended on blogging and marketing. They told me about how they boasted to their colleagues about knowing a blogger and how they took pride in not reading my “online diary.” Their rant went onto something about blogs being a younger person’s thing, but to be honest by that stage I was too focussed on the sound of my own soul deflating to pay any close attention to the discussion.

“A blog is not an online diary and a lot more than an online journal, it is a conversation.” Well that is what I should have said, but I didn’t.

Though I did speak up when I was told I should read the Cluetrain Manifesto, and check out Gapingvoid.com, because apparently the “expert” at the business forum recommended it. I couldn’t help but point out that Hugh McLeod , of gapingvoid.com, was a friend of a friend and had actually quoted me on his blog!

If this person actually had read my blog, they would have found their way to the key texts their expert was citing a lot sooner. But then, would it have carried weight for them without the expert’s recommendation? Would it have had the same gravitas if it was not cited in a key business leader’s forum? Sometimes, it is not the content, it is the context that makes a message compelling.

You could use this as a case study in not getting what the blogosphere is all about. Maybe it is also a case study in why business leaders sometimes get trends massively wrong. What it has taught me (or maybe just reinforced), is that people who get the blogosphere understand that expertise is always a relative term and that the expert you need maybe closer and less lauded than you might expect. Blogging and blog-reading shows us that sometimes the B-List is the best path to A-Class ideas.

[tags] Cluterain, Gapingvoid [/tags]