Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Blogging Renewed

Today I read Andrew Sullivan's article "Why I Blog" from November 2008 Atlantic. Andrew draws a comparison to jazz explaining the difference between formal writing and blogging:

To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.


It was with these thoughts loose in my brain that I went for a morning run. Exercise, for me, always breaks the thought jam and results in creative ideas. The end result was a new found perspective on blogging and several topics that wanted to come out. Rather than being worried about correctness and credibility I felt compelled to just get them out. (at least this one is a start)

Of course this is a familiar path that I have said to myself more than twice over the past month. One time was after reading Taylor Graves' post titled "Risk: What is the value?" One quote from the article was "You don’t become an innovator by playing it safe." That was like looking in the mirror. I had never been risk adverse but in the blogosphere I am finding that I wasn't too anxious to post an opinion without checking the sources and verifying my correctness. After reading Andrew's article the reality is that the blog is more or less spontaneous. That is part of the beauty of blogs and developing the conversation. Procrastinating has caused many topics to fall by the wayside. This has also led to me straying from my original intent with the blog to join the conversation.

How do you manage to generate interesting content and keep the conversation going? Do you worry that a post is interesting or not?

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