Applied blogging – why the hell should we blog pt 2

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I talked to a friend yesterday about presenting and spreading new ideas among and audience that is interested, but not yet really ready for it. They are not into the topic , they want something new but they are rather sceptic.

“You should not think about something new, something original”, said my friend. “That challenges people too much – and it’s too much work to shape your idea in a clean and neat way, make it bulletproof and let others try do destroy it.” Is that just lazyness and too much recycling? On the other hand: if your idea is good enough to be made bulletproof, if you spend all that work and time on it – then you should try to sell it.

“I think it is way smarter”, said my friend, “to summarize and comment what others did. There are so many ideas around, famous ideas, and professional thinkers – there is enough to build on. And most people did not get it anyway, the more you repeat it and the more examples and relations you build – the higher the chance that they get excited about what you are telling.”

I think that 98 % of blogs do the same. They tell about what others told, they summarize, they report. So here’s another reason for blogging: It’s a legitimate way to recycle the work of others, to use external knowledge to build your own authority. I think you can go even further: Because blogs usually report things that have been there before, they are a good means to also push new ideas: They are written, they are published, they are usually part of an already ongoing discussion – so the ideas should have some authority…

Is it again vanity? I call it strategy… Know the patterns that rule the world and deal with them.

Applied Blogging: why the hell should we blog?

Why should it be useful to collect personal or teamwide thoughts, ideas, feelings, experiences in an online diary? Why should we do that, why should anybody care about that?
I showed twitter, where I’m following around 30 people (so I’m really modest) to a colleague a few days ago. “These guys must be really lonesome”, she said, “And quite vain.”

So threat #1 could be: Blogging does pretty soon feel like a competition. Who has more, smarter and sexier posts, more comments or followers, gets more subscriptions. So blogging in the company could turn you into the idiot who desperately wants to be mama’s darling.

Another day, I talked to a colleague about a project wiki I’m running where I’m documenting everything that may be important for this project, where I develop requirements and ask users and programmers for their feedback, and where I also run a blog-type news section. “Wow”, he said, “You are not afraid that they steal your ideas and use them somewhere else?” His second concern was about confidentiality: “Are you allowed to talk about all this, is there not a lot of confidential information in your writings, and is anything of that approved?”.
Threat #2 hiding in here is a fear of saying too much: either because you can not fully control the use of your ideas once they are published, or because you have to stand up without management backup. As a publisher, you’re on your own, you don’t have anyone to strengthen your back. That’s actually threat #3; to some it’s challenging in a positive way, to some it’s a very negative scenario.

So what are the pro’s, why am I running my blog?

Reason #1: Blogs are a perfect tool not only to take down notes, but also to find them again. They are well stored in a chronological way, you have a convenient search, you can use tags  or categories and you can use rss not only to syndicate your content (maybe you are not that famous), but also to produce different views on your content: Send people a link to all your writing on tag xy, and you don’t have to bother them with searching or browsing in your blog. To me, that’s efficient communication.
That takes me quite directly to reason #2: Blogging forces you to structure your thoughts. Once you’ve written something down, you can get it out of your head. But it will only stop to haunt you, if you’ve made more of it than just some ambigous keywords – in a few weeks, you will only understand it, if somebody else can also understand it. So blogging is a way of talking to yourself. That’s maybe why threat #1 is sometimes quite a strong one…
(to be continued)