Idea mills
November 4th, 2008 in Shanghai
There are two types of blogs — news sources and idea mills.
The former is pretty self-evident. Most blogs act as news sources, ranging from blogs that really are media outlets to blogs about the daily life of someone’s cat. They are primarily outgoing — they put out new information, and their readers consume them.
The latter are not so obvious. Idea mills are blogs wherein the author or authors put out ideas, concepts, or observations and let their readers think about them, give feedback, push, pull, and generally challenge assumptions. These are the blogs that provide the most value, for they’re not just acting as a spigot, but actively engaging their readers and pushing their readers to grow and learn in order to participate in the conversation.
Over time, I want to make this more of an idea mill, and less of a news source.
Photo credit, mudpig
Nearby Posts
- Newer: Elections, change
- Older: Unidirectional language exchange
November 4th, 2008
What happened to the “Learning on your terms” idea-mill blog? That seemed to be exactly what you are talking about in this post.. a two-way street.
November 4th, 2008
Work priorities, mostly. We’re trying to figure out exactly what to do with it. It was still, I think, very much an outward flowing blog, though.
November 5th, 2008
How important do you think the stereotypical ‘poll’ voting widgets are to this bi-directional blogging? What kind of concepts are you thinking of employing to make this happen?
November 5th, 2008
I personally don’t think they’re particularly relevant. They make for good statistics, and are quick to process, but by not allowing verbose feedback greatly limit the sort of “conversation” that can be had.
November 6th, 2008
I totally agree with you. Although I may not have used this terminology, I have consciously striven to make my blog more of an “idea mill” than a news source. It can be a challenge (I’ve been low on ideas lately), but it’s definitely more rewarding.
Reset and reconnect | Learning on Your Terms
November 10th, 2008
[...] my personal blog, I wrote recently about idea mills — blogs in which ideas are presented to readers with the goal of enticing the reader to mull [...]
December 24th, 2008
I also agree with your idea. News is pretty highly commoditized, individual bloggers don’t usually break multiple new stories and the internet isn’t lacking for quantity of content.