Yea, but who is reading it all?

A few weeks ago, my niece, Maren, posted a blog that asked if anyone was reading her posts or if she was just wasting her time. Several friends and family members quickly wrote back to assure her that her blog was indeed being read & enjoyed.

Then my husband went on a road trip with some friends, and created a blog to report their trip to all the families.  They had a wonderful experience, but the blogs ended about 3 days before the trip did.  When I asked him why, he told me that no one was commenting on the blog, so he figured no one was reading it either.  He did, however, continue the story where people were commenting

Then, today, while cruising around the internet, I came across a series of blog posts.  One from Spencer Fry about how "Social is immeasurable and a waste of time." Another from Leo Laporte who realized after a few weeks that his Google Buzz was not feeding his Tweets & no one noticed, not even himself!  He commented that he felt like all the chatting, tweeting, facebooking, etc has been an immense waste of time, and that "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves."  And lastly from  Mike Bonifer, who pointed out that "The most social medium is sexual intimacy, followed ... by meaningful face-to-face conversations, scaling out from there, and eventually reaching the nebulous netherworld of thoughtless Likes, meaningless Tweets and snarky YouTube comments. Noise. Cosmetic data with no emotional or meta resonance."

It made me think about our assignments to no only read each others' blogs, but to meaningfully comment on them - to continue the conversations.  How by really communicating with each other, we are not only learning from each other, but also encouraging, teaching, growing, and not wasting our time!