All of this I essentially knew, but Mark Cuban summed it up succinctly:
In the beginning , blogs were the easiest way to communicate an opinion. Then as with now, writing a blog doesn’t mean that anyone would take the time to read it, but sometimes people did.
Blogging today, is not the same as it was 5 years ago. In the early days of blogging, it served as much as mini social networks as a publishing tool. Many used blogs as a way to communicate with family and friends. I don’t see that as the case any longer. Social Networks have become the primary means of keeping in touch with those close to you. Friendster for a minute, then Myspace and now Facebook are the primary means for people to keep each other up to date. Pictures and privacy have made the biggest difference. Facebook its a quick and easy way to share pictures, videos and updates only among those people you want to see them. It has become a unique utility, which for many people eliminated the need to blog.
Beyond personal communications, blogs have also been used as a broadcast medium by public figures, consultants and corporate executives. Blogs have been the most expedient means to share a point of view, a quick thought , factual reporting and whatever else someone else wants to share to a potentially unlimited audience. RSS feeds have advanced so that it has become incredibly easy for people to subscribe to blogs and quickly determine from the RSS headline or full feed whether or not they want to commit to reading the full post. However that is changing as well.
Enter Twitter. Twitter has quickly changed the nature of "broadcast texting". While Blogs have been a great way to offer complete stories, Twitter, with its 140 character limit, by its nature is the best suited of options for short bursts of content. The size constraint makes “tweets” far less intrusive and easy to receive and read on a phone. Twitter works for what it is designed to do, however its future is not a slam dunk.
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Five years ago blogging was a big step. Now, the internet has become such a stable home and mobile platform for text and graphics, we are going to see a rush of derivative products that we will strain to keep up with, but benefit from as we integrate them
Off and on I toy with the notion of adding MySpace and Facebook dimensions to this blog but invariably decide not to. Presently, a *blog* more than fulfills all of my needs.
As one who's tried, quite unsuccessfully, to get many others to write and/or contribute to blogs, I say from experience that social networking is just *dumbed down* blogging. Facebook and Myspace are to the web what cavity-backed clubs were to the game of golf - open doors for the unskilled, lazy masses.
And who has time to write a blog anyway?
It's a whole lot easier to simply respond to the ramblings of others than it is to collect and articulate one's own thoughts. Not to mention, it's also a whole lot safer for one's own intellectual ego!
I remember at *math camp* some 18 years ago, at the end of the three week session, the director lectured us *geniuses*:
DrGeorge - Now you're all tremendous problem solvers....you're the best around at that....but how many of you know anything about *problem posing*?
I, and I am sure most of the other, much bigger geeks, were stupefied over this line of inquiry. While we learned how to rapidly solve all of the questions from myriad competitions over the last 20 years or so, we never once thought about where these problems originated from. Someone had to *pose* them, right? And a whole lot of deep thought must have gone into framing simple, original questions that invited attainable and elegant solutions.
Sunday night I got into bed with a sheet of paper on my nightstand. In no time at all I had 21 *blog ideas* scribbled down.
Not long ago, it would have taken me hours to brainstorm so efficiently - but over four years of blogging, of PRODUCING CONTENT, my creativity muscles have been found, awakened, and exercised.
It's in all of us. We've just been socialized to passively consume lessons, entertainment, news, and opinions.
As bad as our outsourcing of grunt work (cleaning, cooking, etc.) is, the outsourcing of our mind work has been so much more destructive.
I KNOW that I've gotten many of my readers to, if not venture down the homeschooling route, at least to give it and education in general serious consideration.
But I've been far less successful at inspiring others to write or even contribute to blogs. And that's a darn shame.
Because that's where it all started. I never even heard of homeschooling until my wanderblogging led me to an essay by John Taylor Gatto nearly three years ago.
Y'all need to break free and become the lead actor in your own play.
