Knowledge is Power
If knowledge is power, then community knowledge is even moe powerful. Blogging is a great way to illustrate and practice community knowledge. I’m not talking about displaying your knowledge of a community, but using the community of blog readers and commenters to make the entire community more knowledgeable.
Blogs=Communities of Knowledge
I recently wrote a post about the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 REvealed, wherein I highlighted a downside to the change in capital gains tax rates. The post was widely linked to and over 30 comments came in about the findings. Then at comment #31, a reader brought to light some exceptions I had overlooked. Linda Dvorak deserves a ‘community knowledge award‘ for digging deeper than I had and unearthing some great insight into the realities of the law. This type of knowledge sharing is invaluable to a blog’s community.
Scientific Methods of Blogging
Blogs are like social science experiments. I had put forth the characterizations (observations, definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry) and the hypothesis (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject). I even went deeper in the method by providing predictions (reasoning including logical deduction from the hypothesis or theory) and tests (tests of all of the above).
However, I left out one critical step to a science experiment..RETEST. Fortunately, a blog’s comment section is the perfect forum for retesting. Now, the community has a greater knowledge of the new law and we all owe it to each other for pushing forward, questioning hypothesis and retesting the experiment.
My wife will be proud I used the Scientific Method in a blog post (she taught 7th grade science and kept a blog before becoming a mom 3 months ago), but she’ll be disappointed that I failed to retest my earlier work.
Does your blog foster a community of shared knowledge?
Sources used to create this post: Wikipedia, Agent Genius, The Power of Science
