‘Blogging Makes You Smarter’

Cover shot of Biz Stone’s book, “Who Let the Blogs Out?”
Source: http://www.bizstone.com/2004/09/who-let-blogs-out.html

I promised readers I’d share my impressions of the book by Biz Stone that I found at my local library: “Who Let the Blogs Out?” (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004).

Here’s a selection under “Benefits of Blogging” that I thought worth sharing, because it relates to the benefit I derive when work-Tweeting for the Lake County Record-Bee.

This selection is excerpted from a passage titled “Blogging Makes You Smarter:”

“With a seemingly infinite supply of information on the Internet, a blogger is forced to choose wisely when offering up a link. Then that blogger is tasked with adding succinct commentary to explain why that link is blogworthy. This in and of itself is not so hard, but doing it every day exercises the analytical mind because it forces us not only to choose what we think is interesting but also to pinpoint why we think it is. Then, we convey these thoughts in a short, descriptive paragraph.”

We are, in a word, summarizing — precisely that activity identified by Landon Bryce (thAutcast) as so extremely important a skill after identifying similarities and differences.

Just as when I try to communicate as much about a story as I can with a limited number of characters in a Twitter post, so does blogging offer me a chance at succinct, brief summary.

Bryce’s post about the importance of summarizing is at http://thautcast.com/drupal5/content/autism-and-summarizing. Stone blogs at http://www.bizstone.com/.