on Blogging

   I would like to take the time to talk about blogging in general. What is blogging? What is a blog? Why blog? Why not tweet instead? All of these questions deal with our need to send out our thoughts to nameless people, who may or may not know us personally, and so there is an element of danger that I would like to address now.

   The danger of blogging is that once you have reached a comfortable level of influence among your audience, then there is the temptation to scale back your efforts because you feel that you have over-stretched yourself. You feel that your thoughts have influenced someone else, so that you must find a place to hide to not let your audience know about anything else that you might have to say. In other words, your audience has a chance to talk back to you thru the comments box and that could be worrisome for some folks. (The vision never dies.)

   Now there was a time when this sort of thing happened to me. I put up material from A&O Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization, that was about textual critical issues over the confessions of faith that we as Reformed churches confess. There was a commenter who wanted to challenge me about my sources, so I went back to my sources to find out that he was not seeing the entire picture of where we were at. So I told him that I had a lot more resources than I was letting on. And the commentator had not replied ever since I responded to him (her?) about that issue.

  So I would recommend taking time to get a sense of who your audience is before you post on your blog because then you will be better equipped to answer them, if they respond back to you. That is to say, when you blog, assume that your audience has some idea about what you are talking about, right? Otherwise, I guess that this medium could be used a journal, but who wants to read other folk's personal info on the Internet? So stay nameless as possible on the internetworks.