In the beginning

I recently attended an Informal Learning Unworkshop facilitated by Harold Jarche. It has inspired me to investigate further blogging and to jump onto the blogging bandwagon.

When blogs first came out, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I really didn’t see how they could be applied as a learning tool. I dismissed the idea as a passing fad that would likely die off, as many new technologies are wont to do. The Information Learning Unworkshop helped me re-examine blogging. It has come a long way in the last few years. I think the RSS services have made the technology viable. Without the RSS feeds, you’d have to keep checking websites. I’d never have the patience to keep re-looking. I need the technology to be more of a push then a pull.

Blog + RSS is a pull-push technology. I still need to go to a website to see my feeds, but I don’t need to go to each blog, and I don’t need to remember which blogs I care about. I go to one site, my Internet based RSS reader, and all the blogs I care about are available. What’s great about that, is that I only need to remember one URL! … So, the blog is a pull and the RSS is a push (ish) … hence pull-push.

Now, I have one more URL to remember, the URL to post to this Blog!

The Human Internet
Whilst skiing in the Gatineau Hills yesterday, it occurred to me that blogging makes the Internet human. Actually, it makes the websites on the Internet human. Before the blogging craze, you had static websites that people occasionally updated. They were very impersonal, and typically contained information, but didn’t contain things like, “this is what I did on my vacation”. When you read a persons blog, you see some of their personality. They are human. So blogs make the Internet human.