There has been a lot of conversation over the last week about blogging and bloggers in general. Much of it culminated in a very good post by Robert Scoble which was excellently covered by Mashable’s own Paul Glazowski yesterday but that is really not what I want to talk about in this post. The main thing I want to talk about is what is a blogger’s job? Sure for most it is the reporting of the news, events or similar things but even though that might seem to be the primary reason reason it isn’t.

My job is to make you think.

How I do that can be covered in so many ways even with the traditional news type blogging but regardless of the how’s the end goal should be to get our readers to think about what has been written because then a really cool thing can happen. The reader wants to add their thoughts to yours and all of a sudden you have a live organic thought process happening that grows beyond the original piece. Does this always happen? No, and that is the ultimate shame and waste of this medium we have created because the reader has decided for whatever reason to abnegate their responsibility.

Where my job might be to make the reader think it is the reader’s equal responsibility to engage with the news I might be reporting or the idea that I might be trying to get across and add value to it. That value can be anything from pointing out where I could be wrong and why through to add their own spin what has been posted or even previously commented. It is this communication that turns what is basically talking into a vacuum into a living document that we can all learn from.

I have been really lucky on both Mashable and my own blog here to have written some posts that have really engaged the readers - both good and bad. In either case though I have learned something and I would like to believe that those posts have contributed more than possibly better written posts that had no conversation build around them. As Robert said in his post

This is a participatory media, not a one-way one, and, while it has a different editing system (the editing is done post publishing, not pre publishing) it’s pretty clear to me that this system arrives at the truth a lot faster than anything on paper does.

But, you gotta read and participate in those comments! Lots of old-schoolers don’t like that dirty work.

Equally so readers need to participate because when they do bloggers get better at their jobs. Without our readers involving themselves in the conversation and keeping us on our toes - keeping us engaged in trying harder to make you think. In this process we all have a chance to learn and grow and isn’t that the whole idea behind this social media experiment we are all involved in?

Conversation Tags: blogging, social media