Learning review - Beware of Blogging

Adele wrote about and provided an example of learning reviews on her blog today. It responds in part to my post Beware of Blogging. I have "reciprocal effects" on my mind this week. So it came to mind to reciprocate and do a learning review of my post.

I intended to write about the transformational effects on me -- of blogging which I recently experienced with Brent and my sorting out the reactions to Stephen's critique of Jay's mixer analogy. My posting about blogging as a gift economy was recently quoted in an online school assignment. I found it in my blog reader was getting more trackbacks last week. That kindled my "meta-thinking" about the nature and benefits of blogging. That thinking is a level above what I'm reading, writing and realizing from the content of posts and links.

As I wrote the post, it took on a life of its own - mirroring what I was writing about. It grew into a post about recursive dynamics - which I stated as "Blogging is the repercussions and the reciprocities from responding to responses".

There we several indications that the post was valuable, but troublesome. Besides two comments, I had an email that alerted me to the reader's negative experience of it: scary, melancholy invoking, and "a bit put off by your belief that without people commenting on one's posts, a person really isn't a blogger."

Added clarification is called for about "the number of comments we get on our posts". It's less crazy-making to count the number of comments we give, than receive. We cannot know how our post reverberates through the minds of other bloggers or contributes to their writing. Besides comments, there are links to others' posts, quoting others' posts and writing about others or their posts. There's a big difference between reading an informative post and a post that gives us a mention, puts our words in another context, raises a new question from our insight or challenges our viewpoint to include another. I'm calling that transformational, and for me that's what my blogging is really about.

So I learned a lot:

• My strategy of defining authentic blogging put out too much invalidation and set me up as some kind of judge - yuk!


• Making a big announcement, without the transparency of this post, sets the wrong tone. We need more comfort, fewer wake up calls.


• The emergence of "recursive value" at the end of the post about transformational effects shows me I have more to say on reciprocating, and a better metaphor to use.


• Having pondered all this on and off today, I realized "ecological blogging" is a better way to convey what I'm seeing.

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