Who is the blogging community?
Brand new to the world of blogging, I am intrigued by many questions that expand from this point.
How extensive is the blogging community? What purposes do people use blogs for? How much time do people dedicate to blogging and reading others' blogs? Do people dedicate free time or on-the-clock work time to blogs? Do employers see value in having their workers spend time on work-related blogs?
I have entered into the blogging community because I am participating in an 'Internet Advocacy Communications' course. I'm pretty timid about it. But, drawing from the book our class was assigned this week, Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope - Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics - I'm seeing that there is the potential to bring people together as a community and interact with them -- not just feed them information, but also get their feedback, through blogs. I'm not interested in using a blog as an entirely personal expression - rather, I'd like to learn a lot more about who is engaged in blogging, what types of blog features audiences get excited about, and the anticipated prospects of how rapidly blogging will expand in the near future -- all in order to get a greater community involved in my area of focus for work (and, admittedly, personal interest): wind energy. There is a WindEnergyWorks! blog (http://wewblogs.typepad.com/) which could use much TLC, and I'd like to find out how to provide that!
The Mousepads book argues against the claim that working through the internet is inauthentic. I agree that harnessing the tool of blogging is not inauthentic, but I believe people are fooling themselves if they believe that a blog is a complete form of outreach. I take the fact that I, a recent college graduate, have no prior experience with blogging, to mean that blogging certainly only reaches a slim segment of the population. I am intrigued to know how malleable people are in terms of being led in the direction of blogging, or reading blogs? How mainstream is blogging expected to become? What would intrigue a non-blogger, encourage someone new to participate?
The book also discusses the Dean campaign's experience of blogs, and social networking through meetup.com, fostering an actual community among likeminded supporters of their cause. I like this. I never thought much about this before. Before getting to a point where I could actually bring people together -- which could be possible, through wind energy-related conferences - I'd like to give people the opportunity to interact with eachother, and interact with me, through the internet. I'd like to use a blog as a two-way street. I'd like to provide valuable information to people and receive their feedback -- responses that tell how useful the information was, if it was written for the right type of audience, if there are remaining gaps of knowledge that need to be filled. The Mousepads book refers to this type of interaction as a "positive feedback loop", saying "they showed us where they wanted to be and we led them." I hope we can step the WindEnergyWorks! community up to a level where we can engage in this type of interaction.
Well, those are my first thoughts on blogging. A creation of a positive feedback loop right here -- aka anyone's ideas/thoughts on current and future blogging communities, as well as the most intriguing blogging features people have seen and/or envisioned -- are most welcome!
