Exploring the blogosphere

When I started this blog, I said that I wanted to chat, to reflect on things that might otherwise get lost in a busy professional life. Now the use of the word chat implies a conversation.

When I began I knew the that the blogosphere was incredibly crowded. I had not realised how crowded.

Technorati presently monitors 47 million sites with 2.7 billion links! The number of blogs grows all the time, especially among young people. My eighteen year old's group uses blogs as a device for keeping in touch, for sharing photographs in particular. Some of those blogs are created and then just sit there, others change all the time.

So how do we explore this incredibly crowded space to best advantage, how do we use it to achieve our own ends whether they be professional, business or simply conversational? I think that it all depends upon purpose.

I first became interested in blogging because I saw it as a tool that my own professionals within the Ndarala Group might use to achieve their practice objectives, promoting their expertise to a broader world. This can be especially helpful for the self employed professional lacking the promotional resources of a conventional organisation. This remains my view, although there are a number of difficulties to be overcome if it is to work.

I then looked at blogging as an internal communications device and learning tool within organisations, especially where an actual or potential community of practice was involved. I think that this is one of the most exciting practical applications of the blogging format.

More recently, I have focused on blogging as both conversation and a way of finding things - personal and professional - that I might otherwise miss.

In the next few posts I want to record some of the things that I have learned. In doing so, I will write not as a technical professional - I am in awe of the technical expertise I have found among bloggers and cannot hope to match this in anyway - but focus instead on the personal lessons.