What blogging means to me

Om Malik (@om) is an award-winning journalist who worked for Quick Nikkei News, Forbes.com, Red Herring and Business 2.0 before founding GigaOmniMedia. It was guys like Om who influenced me to start blogging, which in turn led to my founding LexBlog and LXBN. In an interview this week with Outlook India, Om explained what blogging meant to him.

The idea of blogging is sharing and telling people this is how I view the world. We get confused by blogging as an opinion and as news. We have pigeonholed blogging into this platform based blogging which is not quite it. You could be on WordPress, Twitter, Tumbler or Facebook, as long as you are writing, creating, opining, sharing any kind of thing, it is blogging. We have earlier, written personal diaries, we have shown photographs to friends. Blogging is the same over a much open (and at) Internet scale. It is a good thing as more creative people are coming out of the shadow(s). It is very important for people to see the other point(s) of view.

Blogging to me means sharing what I read and observe and then providing my take or insight on what I am sharing. Blogging is a conversation in which I listen first, share what I’ve heard, and then offer what I make of what I’ve heard. The technology which allows me to follow subjects and people I want to follow and which allows other people to ‘hear’ what I’ve just said about what they may have written or said is just that, technology. Blogging is the purest form of networking online. Short form social media, all of which I use and value (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn) do not allow others to see what makes me tick at a deeper level; why, by reading what I write, I may know something about what I talk about; and does not let me truly get to know others online. It’s a mistake for lawyers and law firms to pigeon hole blogging as articles, news, updates, or even an opinion, in an attempt to gain visibility. See blogging as blogging. Thanks for all you have done and continue to do, Om.