Blogging Theories (a draft to be corrected)

“So many paths to find a truth and so little room to express it” (Farfu Llero)
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Blogging allows for a closer relationship between writer and reader, where often both become the same entity as they read and write together.
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“Writes Mario Asselin, Principal of Saint Joseph, Quebec, in his own blog, Mario tout de go: The school administration’s objective with this weblog initiative was to offer students and teachers a support tool to promote reflective analysis and the emergence of a learning community that goes beyond the school walls. … I see more than 2,000 posts and nearly 3,000 comments,…… Because of that, I am able to name what they do and see where it comes from. I can also figure out the directions they are taking and how they do it.”

“Dominic Ouellet-Tremblay, a fifth-grade student at St-Joseph, writes: ‘The blogs give us a chance to communicate between us and motivate us to write more. When we publish on our blog, people from the entire world can respond by using the comments link. This way, they can ask questions or simply tell us what they like. We can then know if people like what we write and this indicate[s to] us what to do better. By reading these comments, we can know our weaknesses and our talents. Blogging is an opportunity to exchange our point of view with the rest of the world not just people in our immediate environment.’ ”

“In one sense, asking why anyone would write a weblog is like asking why anyone would write at all. But more specifically, the question is why anyone would write a weblog as opposed to, say, a book or a journal article. George Siemens, an instructor at Red River College in Winnipeg and a longtime advocate of educational blogging, offers a comprehensive list of motivating factors. In particular, he notes, weblogs break down barriers. They allow ideas to be based on merit, rather than origin, and ideas that are of quality filter across the Internet, ‘viral-like across the blogosphere.’ Blogs allow readers to hear the day-to-day thoughts of presidential candidates, software company executives, and magazine writers, who all, in turn, hear opinions of people they would never otherwise hear."

“But perhaps the most telling motivation for blogging was offered by Mark Pilgrim in his response to and elaboration on "The Weblog Manifesto": ‘Writers will write because they can’t not write. Repeat that over and over to yourself until you get it. Do you know someone like that? Someone who does what they do, not for money or glory or love or God or country, but simply because it’s who they are and you can’t imagine them being any other way?’ "
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It sabotages the publishing and academic industry’s economic, ideological and linguistic control of what is written and read; and how author and reader interact with each other.
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“Got to get the balance between productivity and assimilation of knowledge. There is only so much time in the day, and it is very easy to get distracted into reading too much, with a resultant drop in writing output”. By SEOriousresults

“I’m sure most of us read other blogs not just to assimilate knowledge but also to give us a change of scenery from our own work. Being part of a community is also nice.” By PS3 on Apr 20, 2008
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Ad Age reported this year that 35 million workers - or one in four people in the US labor force - spend an average of 3.5 hours, or 9%, of each work day reading blogs. I think that maybe that’s too much of a “much-needed break.”
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Readers can instantly react to the text and reshape what is written, create their own texts and another and another and another. OMG, I am losing control......
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Selected Sources

http://www.adesblog.com/2008/04/18/top-bloggers-do-not-read-blogs/#ixzz1KFeGmU00
http://blog.jackvinson.com/
Educational Blogging© 2004 Stephen Downes EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 14–26.