WOW! Do I feel out of it. Here in Petaluma, our local newspaper, the Argus-Courier has recently made it possible for their readers to become bloggers. Even some of their reporters have created blogs. A whole new world is opening up, and it is called “Blogosphere.” I stepped up to the plate, at the invitation of the publisher, and started to blog using the theme, Our Cyberplace. (Actually, this wasn’t my first blog. In 2003, I had started one called Our Cyberspace on our community’s portal site – PetalumaOnline. As many of my readers know, over the past few months I’ve become addicted to blogging. I have to write my daily “fix,” or I don’t feel right for the rest of the day. My blogging is one way that I believe I can do something “good” for my community and thereby feel “comfortable” with myself.

Guess what I did this morning, or was it yesterday morning.? In any event, the sun hadn’t come up yet, so I decided to do a little searching … on the Internet, of course, where else? Enter the word, “blog,” and up pops more links than you can possible to click on in one day. There was one entry, however, written on May 28, 2002, by John Hiler, that caught my eye. It is titled, “Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem.” It is about “how Weblogs and journalists work together to report, filter and break the news.” John confesses that “trying to understand the complex relationship between boggers and journalists has become my own personal Waterloo.” The three main lessons he has learned may be briefly stated as follows: (#1) Blogs can do a tremendous job breaking news and journalists are wise to start their own to tap that power; (#2) Some rare bloggers become amateur journalists, a status which brings with it its own unique ethical challenges; (#3) Most bloggers are more like Columnists that capital-Journalists.

If you want a real mental exercise that will require you to use all 16 cylinders of brain power, take a look at the 12 page document that traces his search for a metaphor that applies to blogging. John use of an ecosystem to describe a blogging biosphere captured my attention because one of my blog themes is titled, “Our Web of Life” and the basic underlying concepts of ecology have proven useful in understanding other social phenomena. He does an interesting job of dissecting our “Blogosphere.” Take a look at his complete article … http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogosphere.htm to see if the “biological ecosystem” metaphor is useful. It will either “blow your mind” or “put you to sleep.” Enjoy and stay tuned.