Fishing In The Pond Of the Blogosphere

I don't like to cross-post content among our different blogs, but I felt this post would make sense to the brandstorming audience as well as to the online employment community.

I was musing about what the difference between a writer and a blogger were. As we struggle for the definition, my left brain tells me it's the software, whether or not it has comments, and if you self-label as a blogger.

My right brain tells me something, different.

A writer focuses on the content, teasing meaning and clothing argument in metaphor to generate results from a reader. The goal is to elicit emotions, whether those emotions be delight at reading a fiction novel, a thrill from reading a mystery, or trust from reading an industry expert.

A blogger joins a community of like-minded people and experiences life with them. That's the best definition. A blogger has to write to communicate, but their goal is to build a healthy ecosystem of other bloggers that supports them, encourages them, and feeds them, in the sense that getting "fed" is intellectual and emotional stimulation. Blogging is community.

Many people use the word community to mean - we want a captive audience to feed products to. Others use it as a decriptive term meant to break readers down into convenient demographics to sell ads to. I don't have a problem with those actions if they are ancillary. If your focus is making money, you are probably going to fail at building a strong community. The key is finding balance between monetizing your community and draining it of value.

Anyone who has fished a pond knows this. You have to be smart about how you extract value, or you risk destroying the ecosystem that keeps your community alive. What's cool about his metaphor is you can use it for so many examples: Fisheries, agriculture, poultry farms, and User Groups. There's also something to be said about teaching a man to fish in there.