Technology enables dialogue

Lundblad responds to my post yesterday about the importance of blogs. Among other things he writes: “But writing is the most important. Not blogging.” (What is blogging really?). And I agree, a democratic society benefits from having thinking citizens that are able to freely express what’s on their minds and blogs have enabled millions of people with easy access to a writing platform. But the technology does play an important role here and that’s why I pointed to syndication and connectivity yesterday. If we are to look at this topic from a democratic standpoint, then a million webpages with people writing is a good thing. But what is better than writing is dialogue. The way blogs enable people to engage in conversations with others is a strong power that has already brought down both politicians and media stars from their previously almost untouchable positions. This network effect would be hard to achieve if there were 6 million web diaries that only to a limited extent read and challenged each other.

About the connectivity: ego-searching on Google is not quite the same as checking Technorati links, for several reasons. Google is not updated (I think) as frequently and there is nothing that indicates that a new link automatically gets such a high rank in Google that you can easily find it. Technorati on the other hand is updated continuously. An hour after I wrote my last post, you could find it if you searched Lundblad’s domain on Technorati, and it was shown first because it was the latest link. And if you want to know what others write about your blog, you could do like me and create an RSS feed for Technorati links and subscribe to it in your news reader. The address to my feed is http://www.technorati.com/watchlists/rss.html?wid=13545. That way I don’t need to search myself, I get information automatically the minute it happens.

That is why I mean that the choice of channel is extremely important. Of course the writing is number one, that is the reason why we spend all these unpaid hours in front of the computer. But the result can be vastly different if you choose to write on a regular website or an RSS-enabled blog.