I’ve really been diggin’ this whole blogging thing lately. It’s such a great way to express your opinions and ideas on basically anything you wanna communicate about. There are really no limits to what you can address here. Plus, through sites like Technorati.com 20.6 million blogs are interconnected in real-time, making it easy to find other people blogging about the same things you are (in my case, youth ministry). I came across this entry and thought it summarized the current status of blogging pretty well. Kinda has me curious to know exactly where all this is going.

Why Starting a Blog is Like Starting Email

I’ve been talking to a lot of people who are at the edge of starting blogs and fairly nervous about it. One of the fears is that once they start, they won’t have much to say. While this actually could happen, I think it is unlikely. I’ve been struggling to say why, but an idea just came to me….

Remember when email just started up? We all marveled at it, but were unsure what to say to our friends. So we forwarded jokes and we passed along information we received from friends who got it from sources unknown and it turned out to be false. Over time, people got to understand the email channel and how to use it and to that most of us have too little time to enjoy a good joke. We also learned to be extremely careful about sending along potentially damaging information from unknown sources.

Now we are swamped in email–email that we cannot live without. I just suffered a week of email woes while traveling and a day later, I’m still scrambling to catch up with my work. We are mostly prudent in what we send and we understand the problem with the channel is that bad guys continue to gunk it up.

Blogging is like this. It is new and many people don’t know how to use it. But once they use it, they will find an endless amount of things to say. People go through trial and error, but they learn to be accurate and relevant, and they become less fearful of the channel. Finally they will wonder how they spent all those years living without it.

Posted on November 4, 2005