Robert Ambrogi Blog
“Are you a 10?” Chris Lydon prodded attendees at BloggerCon, measuring the significance they attach to blogging as a phenomenon. I didn’t have to think hard to know I’m somewhere on the high end of the scale. But I did have to think a bit harder about why. Are blogs as significant as the printing press, the telephone, even the Internet itself? Blogging is important because it is another step in breaking down barriers to communication. Everyone says it, but it’s true: The excitement I feel about blogging is the same I felt when I first ventured on to the Internet a decade ago. The world suddenly became smaller, more intimate. Blogging takes that to the next level. It doesn’t just break down geographic barriers and time barriers, but also social, professional and interest-group barriers.
I consider my blog to be primarily for lawyers. But I learn everyday that its readers come from all walks of life and all areas of the world. That shouldn’t surprise me, because I sure don’t read only law blogs. I read blogs about journalism, blogs about politics, blogs about tech, blogs about navel gazing, blogs about anything that interests me.
Blogs are more the Web than the Web ever was before. I shoot out a strand to connect to that blog on law and then to that blog on journalism and then to that blog on tech. And some of those blogs shoot strands back at me. And others I didn’t even know about shoot strands at me. And pretty soon we have this simple but enormously intricate web of interconnection, pulled together not by any single interest in a single topic, but by our many overlapping interests in dozens of topics. Blogging emphasizes who we are, not what we are or where we work or where we live. It is a new form of communicating and connecting and, for that reason alone, it is revolutionary.
So, OK Chris, put me down as a 10.