Thanks to Elliot Harmon for the kind words about Jacob and my session at the Craigslist Bootcamp. That was a fun one. At one point, I went down on one knee a-la Phil Donahue (I was sans coffee that day). He reinforced a point of our presentation which is that blogging is the easiest, cheapest, most effective gateway to "Web 2.0." If you do nothing else, blog.
In fact, I just wrote up an email about "the value of blogging" apropos an email exchange that a friend and i had. Reposted here:
picture this: we just had an interchange about breast cancer, crowdsourcing, and volunteering. truth is, that i'll probably be too lazy to document it on my intranet. so the idea will remain in our heads and may or may not be remembered in time. the email will be lost. if i'm very good, i'll write it up on the intranet and will be able to bring back the idea when it's relevant.
enter blogging: instead of sending you an email, i do a post about this topic on my blog and ask you to read it and respond to it there. the post is indexed by technorati, google, and the rest. over time, my blog starts to hit high on the keywords 'crowdsourcing' 'mobile phone' and 'volunteering' - and whenever people do a search for combinations thereof, my blog comes up. so when conference organizers want to know who the experts are, they call me. when the media wants to write a story, they call me (this happens all the time with "SMS" and "youth vote" as a result of this mobilzing youth blog). when Obama's transition team is looking for innovative ways to engage the young citizenry, they call me (this is theoretical, of course). this one post, although not much in and of itself, adds fuel to the fire of my blog, organization, and career.
but that's only the ancillary benefit. the real benefit is that i've documented the topic in a way that is accessible to me and my organization in the future - i browse my relevant blog tags to see all of these ideas over time. and they are also accessible to the community of people interested in the topic - so we have other like-minded people blog about it and link to it, which again adds fuel to the fire - and it's all gravy. i(we) barely did anything to attract all that extra fuel. we just had a text based exchange that normally would have been lost to email.
every meaty thought-laden interchange that i have with someone (that isn't private) - every bit of research that i do - every article that i discover ... is an opportunity to increase the success of my organization and blog.
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