A Pragmatic Theory of Blogging

A few days ago, I finished reading Who Let the Blogs Out? by Biz Stone.

The book is sold as something of an idiot's guide to blogging, but I found it to be something quite different. It seemed to me that Stone was attempting to explain the practical benefits of blogging in various situations, from the classroom to the Ecosystem, and in doing so the book contains a number of allegorical and theoretical gems.

In discussing the Ecosystem, Stone draws from James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, a book which has made quite a splash and which I have been meaning to get around to reading.

From page 197, in the last chapter of the book:

Rumors and misinformation can also spread through the blogosphere, but there seems to be a code among bloggers as a whole to sniff out lies and self-correct when things get out of hand. It may have something to do with what author James Surowiecki wrote in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki says that a crowd becomes "wise" when it has a diversity of opinions from a decentralized group of independent members and a good method for aggregation. The blogosphere is a diverse collection of opinions published on independent blogs that are spread across the web and aggregated by search engines. So the blogosphere is a wise crowd and wisdom does not tolerate misinformation.

Stone then goes on to lay a theoretical framework for the internal machinations of the Ecosystem, drawing on Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, yet another book I need to read.

Gladwell describes three categories of people that are necessary to reach a tipping point and turn momentum in a particular direction: Connectors, or people who know a lot of people and can point them towards something in particular, Mavens, or people who actively accumulate information and bring it to the attention of Connectors, and Salesmen, or the people who take what the Connectors pointed them to and bring it to the attention of their seperate social circles.

These are not essentialized categories; it's possible to be any combination of the three or all of them at once.

Stone relates this to the Blogosphere by using a specific example of a blog that experienced a spike in their traffic.

Breaking down the recorded information, Stone discerns the process:
Glenn Reynolds credits one Ginger Stampley with having found the entry in question. Stampley is the Maven, she located the information and Reynolds picked it up from her.

Reynolds then links to the entry. Since Instapundit averages more than a hundred thousands page visits a day, even a 16-word entry managed to send 946 people directly to the article he linked to. Reynolds acts as a connector here; a huge amount of people are familiar with him and go to him to help them find something good to read, and using the information he got from his Maven, he turned brought his readers' attention to the entry.

Now, the traffic the entry received was not limited to the people who went directly from Instapundit. Many of the people who frequent Reynolds' blog are bloggers themselves. The ones who found the entry interested linked to it on their own blogs, selling it to their own readers who vary in magnitude but are assuredly in a smaller pond than Instapundit. These, according to Stone, are what Gladwell would call salesmen. I myself have enjoyed the advantages of this side of things on occasion. I regularly submit to blog carnivals in order to gain what little exposure I can, but it is always more satisfying to find that someone who stumbled onto Sophistpundit, be it through carnivals or through search engines or what have you, has chosen to reference it themselves, and discuss something I've brought up.

Stone also discusses how some businesses have integrated blogging into their personnel management.

I'll break down an example of how I understood this structure to work.

You give people work-blogs and tell them to stick to work-related topics; making everyone a Maven of sorts. The information that they gather is then easily accessible by curious higher-ups, who can search through a company-programmed search-engine, or simply get managers to compile what they feel is the most relevant/important information from the people that they oversee.

A level beyond that, group blogs can be set up for particular projects, facilitating the exchange of information between everyone working on them. A post could be put up, and linked to in the sidebar, dealing with the costs thusfar and what they've been spent on. Discussion on this topic could take place in the comments section, and the post could be continually updated as new information came in. This would be a far more effective and centralized manner to communicate than endless strings of e-mails and phone-calls which only a specific few have access to at any moment and which cannot be recorded in a way that won't become obsolete the second something new happens.

Though Stone briefly touched the possibilities for blogs in the classroom, I think that he should have applied the above model rather than discussed it as a seperate issue. Students could all be given blogs which were only accessible to those in the class. They could each be pushed to do research on the same subject, each of them using different sources, and then blog about them. Then, the teacher could grade them on the quality of their research, and on the teacher's own blog, compile the information they had gathered and present it in a way that is more accurate than any one of their accounts, and hopefully better written as well.

This would make the students active participants in the learning process, and it would also create a direct interaction between the teacher and each of their students. Likewise, the business model makes every employee an active documentor of data, and facilitates interaction between the various levels of management.

Biz Stone put his finger on exactly why Blogging is a big deal--because it has reaped great practical benefits, and has the potential to bring us much, much more.