Why Blogging Works - A Case Study
December 2nd, 2004Well, not a real case study, but a story that could be turned into a case study.
On Tuesday, I blogged about CiteULike. Big whoop, right? Everyone is blogging about CiteULike. It’s hot right now. Big deal.
Here’s the big deal. The day after I blogged about it, I received two IM’s related to that post. One from Dan Chudnov (whose work I’ve always admired) and Richard, the creator of CiteULike (who I now admire). Dan and I chatted about a comment I made that alot of this backend programming stuff is over my head and if I should be knowledgeable of the techie stuff that goes into projects like CiteUlike. I explained that I should know a bit, but don’t want to get bogged down in techie stuff. I just want to show of the resource, come up with suggestions on how to make it better, and move on (which is what I usually do). Dan and I exchanged IM addresses and will now be chatting regularly (I hope). This happened because of my post. I could have easily e-mailed (gasp) Dan earlier in my library career, but didn’t. It took blogs to get us together.
During my chat with Dan, Richard “beeped in”, saying that he saw my post and wanted my thoughts on library integration. I explained that academic libraries should promote this product on their Web sites and possibly utilize the software for link building and collaborative ventures within the academic community of their particular university (this type of networking works best when placed within the confines of similarities among users - See thefacebook.com). He explained his ideas around integration of the product into library databases, which thrilled me. Richard is onto something with CiteUlike and I wish him all the successes that it will bring. Again, we chatted because of my blog and for no other reason.
So, why does blogging work? Because it brings people together. And, because of resources like Feedster and PubSub, it is easy to track what people are saying about your work. After that, we introduce ourselves to one another, we network, we communicate, we come up with new ideas, we collaborate, we IM, we text-message, and we talk on the phone. Because of blogs. All because of blogs. Blogs work. Period.