I've been thinking a lot about blogging recently, probably because I'm getting ready to. I've been really interested in how it works as a system.
I hope I'm not dully repeating brighter minds when I suggest that blogging is social search in action.
What's exciting to me about blogs is that they represent so many different outlooks, each a different lens for viewing the world's information. Each captures a slightly different breadth of information and filters out slightly different content.
There are a lot of bloggers, focused both narrowly and generally. Each one focuses on something of interest to himself or herself and seeks out information to blog about. Once the news (whether it's about someone's cat or the latest "iPod killer") hits the Web, bloggers with similar interests have the opportunity to pick it up. Whether they do depends on just how interested they are in the story.
So, to get the news I want, I just find a few blogs written by people whose interests overlap mine - people with the right combination of catchement area and filters for my needs. The social element interests me, because I like the idea of distributed knowledge and distributed responsibilities. In this case, different people keep an eye on different parts of the news landscape (with help from likeminded individuals) and report on selected parts of what they see.
