Let blogs speak for themselves

On an enterprise level, blogging is held in high regard as a tool of rapid innovation , allowing experts to communicate and brainstorm with unprecedented efficiency. The wisdom of crowds is being utilised to allow large organisations and individuals alike, the opportunity create better products and maintain healthy competition. But to the broader public, it seems this breakthrough in social communication appears as nothing more than a public diary. Let’s start, I say, by breaking down this wall.

How can we do this? Well it helps if we’re all speaking the same language.

In Margaret Simons’ commentary “Towards a taxonomy of blogs”, the award winning journalist discusses desire for our vocabulary to grow, enabling more accurate critique.

“I think the need for new vocabulary is becoming urgent…. The question was asked ‘Is blogging one of the hopes of the future?’

As speakers variously scoffed at the idea or spoke hopefully, it dawned on me that we were not necessarily talking about the same phenomena. Some blogs offer hope for a new kind of journalism. Some don’t, because they are doing a different kind of thing; things which may in themselves be valuable.”

From “The Diary” blog, to “The News” blog, to “The Pamphleteering” blog, I agree that for the system to function better there is need for well defined terms. In turn, this will hopefully lead to specialist functionality improvements; the creation of new environments, totally dependent on the context. Come to think of it, isn’t that exactly what Myspace and Twitter are already doing for the social context?

It won’t matter how quickly the new vocabulary moves and mutates as long as the term clearly describes the entity.

I don’t want to dwell for too long on the subject, however, it would be interesting to see what tech terms are floating about that you or a colleague are believed to have coined and feel strongly for.

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