Bold Growth

For some in the early 2000s, blogging was to be just a kind of self-centered fad. Now at the start of 2009, with the number of blogs now tracked by Technorati between then and now at 133 million, you can guess how this much this statement was in the wrong.

While I can't deny that a part of blogging isn't self-centered, from what I've seen, the lifeblood of any good blog is its ability to bring the content. It advances the fringe where ideas are evaluated based on their merit rather than their source. In The Art of Blogging, George Siemens refers to a blog as a tool for self-expression, learning, community building, self-marketing and campaigning. The real-time and free-flow elements of the medium are something to be harnessed.

The weaknesses of the uncensored, unmediated and uncontrolled voice are clear features that differentiate it. In this way it is a weblog's greatest weaknesses that bring about its strengths. Subscribing to a kind of ethical code referred to in Rebecca Blood's seminal 2001 article Weblog Ethics, a blog can be created to make a better contribution to topics of interest.

Just like any innovation which is built on existing perceptions and structures, the fruition of cyberspace and the blogosphere is not complete. This disruptive technology has continued its strong organic growth within the available means of technology.

What seems certain for now is that blogging satisfies some core human demand. Information, instead of just being put together by media organizations is now imagery-laced, hyperlinked, democratized and community-based. The story-telling is up to those that we can either relate to or choose to ignore.