I'm on a roll this week. Or I should say that the people I follow are on a roll that links very nicely to things I've been pondering lately. This evening, Harold Jarche has a nice discussion of why he blogs. He calls it Active sense-making.
As I’ve said before, this blog is mostly for me. These are my half-baked thoughts which I make public in order to share and to learn. Many posts get built upon or edited several times and may become part of a longer article or white paper. Most of what is posted here is raw material. Much of the nuance or context is in the flow of the conversations here over the years. The process is often more important than the product.
And this is right in line with my previous post, linking to Thomas Vander Wal's comments about how ideas flow from the individual outward. If the individual doesn't have a reliable process to ponder and think - to make sense of their own ideas and how they relate to what's happening in their environment - then it will be much harder to build upon those thoughts into work product and ideas that a larger group can use. The "sense" process in the middle of Harold's image here is all about learning and feedback. The incubation time depends on all sorts of factors. Just like I've been doing recently, a lot of thoughts may come together that make much more sense today than they might have a few months ago, simply because of what I've been pondering as well.
I love it. My favorite description of blogging in this mode is, "Thinking out loud." (And Jim McGee rightly gets credit for pushing me into blogging. Here is the evidence in some Thinking out loud posts of his.)
[Image credit: Harold Jarche, "PKM Sense-Making," as found here.]