Battle of the Network Blogs

I learned a few lessons in blogging the other day, while comparing notes with Mal Watlington. Mal and I are co-presenting a "Battle of the Blogs" next week at the Mass Bay Organizational Development Learning Group (ODLG).

I'm looking forward to our presentation. Blogs are one of those things that seem more high tech than they really are, especially to a decidedly tech-averse group like ODLG. Mal and I hope to demystify blogs while sharing our experience of how they are useful to professionals in general and OD consultants in particular.

Talking with Mal, I discovered that I am a fairly low-tech blogger. I go about my day, and much of what I share in Connectedness I learn about in old-fashioned ways like talking with people and reading articles. In a typical day I do not read a single blog, although I do rely on the Internet heavily and consider myself a brown-belt Googlemeister. Meanwhile, uber-bloggers like Robert Scoble manage to "read" 1,000 blogs a day, thanks largely to ever more sophisticated aggregator technology.

Moreso than aggregators, I'd list search engines and social bookmarks as the top gee-whiz assistants to my personal information gathering. Recently I commented on OutFoxed as a nice tool that integrates both searching and social bookmarking, by re-ordering my google results according to feedback from my network of trusted informers. Just yesterday this network-assisted search unexpectedly turned up a living overview of social bookmarks maintained on the community blog ConsultantCommons. Then I looked at myself with an ironic smirk: Funny how we so easily get caught up in feeding technology upon itself.