Amy Gahran jumps into the discussion of blogs as brain-augmentation tools. Blogging for Brain Augmentation: Contentious Weblog
My brain is not enough! Too often, thoughts occur to me, or connections become apparent, that I very much wish to remember and use... but then along comes a flood of additional thoughts, and distractions, and minutiae, and so my moments of clarity dissolve into the infohaze.
She references a number of people and articles that are famililar on the topic of how the act of blogging augments personal memory. I find my blog only one piece of the puzzle, since these are items I deem worthy of being posted to the public conversation. I know some people keep blogs on their home machines to jot down those personal notes.
What about reading blogs? Reading exposes me to new ideas and new perspectives in areas where I have a strong interest. I have greatly expanded my understanding of knowledge management by reading what other people think on the topic. Of course, having the opportunity to actually test these ideas in practice solidifies my understanding, but there is such a wide diversity of ideas that I couldn't hope to learn-by-doing in all these areas.
But how to read these blogs? I keep adding more and more. Aggregators certainly help, but I keep getting the feeling that I am not "doing it right." And then we learn that Scoble reads over 1000 blogs in his aggregator via judicious scanning. I am starting to make better use of marking blog posts for later commentary via the tools built into Outlook (in combination with NewsGator).