Why blog and share your ideas?

In response to a friends question, why blog or share information with others via the Internet? 

I believe that the iterative power of the Internet can help us shape, evolve and improve our knowledge and capacity to learn.  As a result, traditional methods of logging/journaling your thoughts and sharing them on paper(or by email) are quickly dying.  Social networks make it easier to share and collaborate about important experiences and ideas using words, pictures, links and comments.

Most importantly, in these times of great financial uncertainty, trusting in your business partners becomes extremely important.  One of the first resources prospects will use to evaluate an individual such as a real estate agent or a homebuilder will be an Internet search.  Those whowill be chosen first will be those that have the most professional associations, recommendations, connections,  interesting content, blogs entries, quality lists of associates and "friends".

Here is why I believe it is so important to push yourself to participate now:  Our children are in the middle of the next media revolution that could sweep right past the Baby Boomers, Gen Xs and Ys.  Knowing there is much more on the line for our kids makes it a priority that we utilize this window of opportunity to engage and help them build their networks.  Embracing this change and keeping up with the pack is a much better option versus being relegated to the information dinosaur pile, isolated from rapidly growing networks that are learning and evolving.

The pundits say that the best way to build your social network is to start (for us newbies) with your family connections (as automatic "friends") and then expand to non-family friends.  Eventually this investment in time will yield dividends through experimentation which helps all of us.  Also keep in mind that as you get beyond the initial set-up your learning curve moves up rapidly.  I propose that you try one of the new media like Facebook, Linked-In, or building a blog site sometime in the next several months.

One fear that temporarily held me back was privacy and my fear of who might view my entries on Facebook, Twitter, my blogs and LinkedIn.  This concern surfaced in the last few weeks with proposed changes to Facebook's privacy policy.  However almost all social media sites provide settings that allow users to set preferences to limit which content your "friends" or the "public" can view, which I believe adequately addresses the privacy issue.

For my personal blog I chose to have a paid subscription so that there is no advertising but you can also blog for no cost if you are willing to put up with the advertising.  For professional blogs I would definitely recommend a paid subscription or WordPress which is free program that you download and host. 

Generally the content you contribute is yours, not the host site's.  You may share your ideas and you may withdraw them from view.  However in the Internet world once you share your content publicly you lose a large degree of control.  Always keep this in mind and be very selective as to what information you choose to place in public view.

Here are a few ideas on how to get started (and many of you may already know about these resources):

1. Facebook is a place to exchange and share information with others in a fairly secure space....in that only "friends" can see your pages.  Maybe you already do this.  Sue has really enjoyed it with her friends over the last 6 months.
2. Linked-In is a fabulous place to share your profile with other professionals and join like-minded groups and communities.  The fast growing membership of LinkedIn could be an excellent resource should you be in the job search market. One great feature is giving and recieving professional recommendations from associates in the LinkedIn network.
3. Typepad, Blogger, and others are paid or free blogging services... I am using Typepad for this blog entry and it costs me $45/year.  It takes an hour or two to initially set up and figure out the basics.
4. If you have work e-mail but no personal e-mail address consider Google, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL.  These services are easy to use and access. Also Google apps give you many other great new applications such as online documents, spreadsheets, photos and much more.  These are all "free" services but they are supported with advertising. 
5. Twitter is a great micro-blogging site that allows you to communicate with others very efficiently.  The reason I like Twitter is that messages cannot be longer than 140 characters so they are easy to read.  Once you have a community of friends it is an excellent way to stay connected in either your profession or personal communications.
6. Delicious, Digg, Newsvine, Technocrati and others are great social bookmarking and commenting site for sharing links and other information you find on the web.  These sites would be more appropriate for advanced users.

I look forward to your comments.