Serendipity35

Last semester, I asked my grad students to each create a blog to use during the semester. None of them had written a blog before, in fact, most were not blog readers. Throughout the semester, they were asked to respond to topics from the course.

One topic I asked them to consider were the roles that a blogger might need to assume while creating a blog. I presented a few obvious ones - writer, editor, web designer (whether you choose a template for your blog's design or customize it) - and asked them to go on from there.

Since then (and as I prep for the fall version of that course), I have come across other bloggers staring into the mirror. In a post called What Type of Blogger Are You? by Sam Huleatt, he defines three types of bloggers: Proactive, Reactive and Insight. (Yeah, the structure is not parallel - it should be "insightful" but turns out he has 2 types of bloggers, one type of blog.)

He defines proactive bloggers as ones who are consistently posting original and innovative ideas - personal observations, research, developing theories etc.

Reactive bloggers provide value to readers by aggregating news & other blogs and hyper-linking. His examples would include some New York Times blogs.

Insightful bloggers are ones that he feels combine proactive and reactive - reacting to events, news, or analysis with their own insight/opinion.

Certainly, I wanted my students to be proactive or insightful by those definitions. Still, there is value to the reactive blog that aggregates the best of what's out there and acts as a filter for you.

Marc Andreessen says on his own blog that writing a blog is "way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book - but provides many of the same benefits."

I think it's an application of the 80/20 rule -- for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).

Arguably blogging is better because the distribution of a blog can be even broader than a magazine article, a published paper, or a book, at least in cases where the article/paper/book is restricted by a publisher to a limited readership base.

This of course assumes that you're not trying to make a living writing magazine articles or books, or you're not trying to get tenure as a professor by publishing peer-reviewed research papers.

It's also been striking to me how much more fun blogging is versus public speaking -- at least for me. And the reach from blogging seems to be much broader than speaking even at the largest conferences. I'm not sure I'll ever speak in public again -- I'll be at home instead, blogging in my underwear.

• Blogging tolerates and even encourages stylistic idiosyncracies that traditional publishing would not accommodate.
• Incremental thinking is OK.
• Interactive feedback with readers is possible, even easy.
• Revisions in the face of new information are OK. Personally, I think it's a great idea to go back and revise blog posts based on new information.
• Your weird writing style and flowery language is not necessarily held against you.
• And of course it's much easier to link to other information or other people in blogs than it is in books or magazine articles.

Andreessen is a special case - a kind of celebrity blogger and that changes or possibly adds some roles. More on celebrity blogging later this week, and in part two of this post, I will look at the roles that my students discovered last semester and for the start of this semester.