Professions in the blogosphere: is there a pattern? from Seb’s Open Research:
Thinking about the professions that are well-represented in the blogosphere…
- software developers (too many to list)
- journalists: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/cyberjournalists.html
- librarians: http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html
- educators: (anyone know a good list?)
- lawyers: http://radio.weblogs.com/0104634/outlines/Law%20Blogs.html (with a subsection on academic law blogs)
I’ve been trying to articulate out what these professions have in common that could explain why weblogging has become an especially popular practice in those areas. I’m not finished thinking about it yet, but I think the commonality has to do with uncovering the implicit.
Software developers patiently explain to a machine things for which humans wouldn’t need an explanation. Journalists take threads from different places and build a coherent story out of them. Teachers patiently explain to students things for which trained specialists wouldn’t need an explanation. Librarians gather and organize explicitly material that is only implicitly connected. Lawyers, whenever they seek to correctly interpret the intent of a law, need to uncover its spirit which is almost always implicit. All of them are not just pattern recognizers, they are also pattern explainers.
Great!
I would add KM people who are trying to uncover and understand grassroots knowledge flows and then enhance them to add business value. I also thought about usability professionals (for me Alertbox was a starting point to think about something like blog), although I’m not aware if there are a lot of blogs by them.
For me, blog is something for articulating ideas. They get some shape once they get out of my brain, and it becomes easier to deal with them. Blog is something for catching those difficult to catch things…
I’m thinking why such articulation is so powerful? I guess this is something to do with another thing: teaching someone else is the most effective learning method (don’t have the reference). Explaining things is the best way to understand them…
Tags: blog research, bloggersArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/08/19.html#a129; comments are here.
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