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Great points. I borrow your ideas in a post of my own today, comparing blogging to Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. His formative, unpolished thinking (and drawing) was an amazing exhibit itself which I saw at the Art Institute in Chicago a few years back. Take a peek, and thanks for the reminder on what blogging can be:
http://edusign.blogspot.com/2007/09/views-on-managing-time-spent-on.html

-Joel G.

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I like this idea of having blogs integrated into the working process. Particularly given the tools that make blog posting only a step away from whatever else one does on the computer – having posts flow with the work seems a natural extension.

Obviously, one wouldn’t want every post to be preliminary thoughts (not that you suggested that). Complete, detailed articles are valuable. But bite-sized approaches to a topic are accessible to busy audiences (no reason their engagement with the blog shouldn’t go in stages, too). Also, I’ve personally always found the notebooks and journals of authors fascinating to read.

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i think this is good advice, Amy. the time-eater for me (OK, given that the blog that is the whiteboard for my new book is dead right now because i am working on something else for a month) is not personal blogging per se but keeping up with the conversation everywhere else. the number of unread feeds in my RSS reader is a whole new thing to feel guilty about.

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I do this all the time, but privately, on my local hard drive. Why would I want to make all of my half-baked drivel public? Why would I want to publish anything that doesn’t put my best thoughts forward in a carefully considered manner? I want to waste the minimum amount of time of whatever audience I have, rather than abuse them with every utterance that occurs to me.

Have you ever had a friend or family member who, when you’re around them, give you a constant, stream-of-consciousness commentary of what they’re doing at that moment, whatever occurs to them? Perhaps they often ask questions before they try to figure out the answer quietly for themselves. Sometimes they want to interrupt you to tell you about every third paragraph they just read in a magazine. That’s what a certain percentage of blogs (and even more so, postings on sites like Twitter or Live Journal) feel like to me.

A friend of mine in public radio said this: “If they [certain elements in the citizen's media movement] are so opposed to editing and good production practices, let them eat C-SPAN.”

I produce a podcast. (Thanks, Amy, for your kind words, earlier.) I sometimes collect 3 hours of interviews and other field sounds to make a 10-minute finished piece. The last thing I would want to do is subject my audience to the tedium of wading through all of that material. That’s why I’m producing the show, to find the few interesting and informative tidbits in those hours of redundant, off-topic, or technically unintelligible material. I expect anybody publishing something for public consumption to do the same, or they’re not going to have me in their audience for long.

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Ya, like you said, I always blog about things that caught my eyes. In short, I blog just about anything… Sometimes I go back to read my older post, it was like traveling back into time. I looked at the older posts and I sometimes laugh, smile, angry, and why oh why my earlier writing was so good, bad, filled with grammar errors, mistakes, bad ideas, and… In truth, a blog depends on the intention of its owner. Some elite blog can be comparing to those big name magazines. Some blogs are just as trashy as Jerry Springer show.

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