An old lover of mine once told me that there are people who talk about events, people who talk about people and people who talk about ideas. Combine this with collaboration vs. competition and here is another set of axes along which we can consider bloggers.<\/p>\n
A friend of mine conveyed a story to me of an incident when he and another pundit blogger were talking about a concept. Suddenly, they both had a look in their eyes, read clearly by each other as a battle cry to see who could blog about it first. Time and trackbacks are the classic weapons used by pundit idea bloggers. They want to get their ideas out there, validated and linked to. The pundit blogger is competing for attention, for validation, for uniqueness.<\/p>\n
The sociable blogger talking about life is not in a race against time or for greater trackbacks. S\/he knows that there are a million different perspectives, all of which are valuable. There is no one truth, only opinions. What makes an event or a person or an idea more valuable in this community is that variety of different opinions on the matter, the variety of different perspectives. Together, as a community, this brings life to something.<\/p>\n
There are two different ways to talk about events, people and ideas and you see this played out by bloggers. Some events are discussed because each parrt of the community wants to bring life to their perspective on the matter. Nowhere is this more true than something that affects everyone differently. Take 9\/11. Everyone blogged\/journaled about it, each with their own voice. What was powerful was to get a fleshed out view of the event from so many different perspectives. Some events are published in competition. How many bloggers do you know who speak of a private event to prove that they were there, to draw attention to their status?<\/p>\n
There are a variety of reasons for which bloggers talk about people. Bloggers show their respect and adoration through links to other people (or their ideas). Bloggers compete with others through similar mechanisms. In some cases, bloggers mock others to prove their self-importance, to increase their stature. The list can go on and is awefully similar to RL. Just as we name-drop in RL, we name drop on blogs.<\/p>\n
Then there are ideas…. Blogs are a public forum. For some, they are a publishing forum. As such, people want their ideas to be unique and first. For others, it is a space to flesh out ideas and thus they put their ideas out there to be discussed, improved upon and dissected. Others put their ideas out there to help shape other known theories. The latter two approaches are collaborative while the first is very much competitive.<\/p>\n
Anyhow, cross collaboration vs. competition with events, people and ideas and you have an interesting lens through which to consider different blog posts. Of course, most bloggers cannot be simply labeled as competitive or collaborative, but a combination of both. Still, there are trends, and this helps explain some blogging habits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An old lover of mine once told me that there are people who talk about events, people who talk about people and people who talk about ideas. Combine this with collaboration vs. competition and here is another set of axes along which we can consider bloggers. A friend of mine conveyed a story to me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}