Putting things in context: why I blog by Dave Pollard

Dave Pollard in Putting things in context: why I blog [via Blogging from the Barrio]

One of the great challenges in knowledge sharing, and in asynchronous communication, is to provide your audience with enough context to understand where your message ‘comes from’ — what mental models, preconceptions, hidden agendas, historical baggage and motivations filter and taint what you say. Conveying this context makes it easier for the recipient of your message to internalize what you’re saying more accurately and fully. It can also prevent misconceptions that lead to argument or disparagement of your point of view. For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to let you know not only who I am (in the sidebar About the Author ), but also why I blog — what motivates me, on top of a heavy business workload, to spend at least 25 hours a week reading blogs and other resources, and writing my own blog posts. So here goes:

I do this for three equally important (to me) reasons:

1. Improve My Writing Skills: [...]
2. Institute Weblogs in Business: As Chief Knowledge Officer of a large professional services company, I’ve been grappling with two major cultural obstacles to knowledge sharing – employees’ reluctance to contribute their knowledge, and the absence of context sufficient to make knowledge that is contributed easy to assess, internalize and re-use. I think employee weblogs might solve both problems.
3. Environmental Activism: [...] …I’m hoping that by blogging environmental manifestos like How to Save the World and The Third Way, SETI-like, I will be able to find like minds with whom I can work to drive a powerful, effective, broad-based environmental movement.

For those that have read my posts before, is this helpful? Should we make it part of the blogger culture that each of us provide some context for our writing with both a bio and a ‘why I blog’ summary?

I’m thinking about another research idea – collecting and analysing “why I blog” posts from different weblogs :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/04/16.html#a551; comments are here.

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