Well Written: "Say Everything" by Scott Rosenberg

Sit back and marvel at this fascinating excerpt from Salon cofounder Scott Rosenberg's penetrating book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (Crown Publishing, 2009):

The sheer volume of blogs evokes a peevish resentment among some observers, as if the outpouring represented a personal affront. How dare all these people presume on our attention! Do they really think that anyone is listening to them? It is certainly possible to blog into a void—to post and post and never get a visitor or a comment. But it's unlikely many of us would persist with such unrewarding labors. Most blogs have some sort of audience, however tiny—moms and beyond. Where do these readers come from? More often than not, they are other bloggers. Observers steeped in the values of the broadcast world identify this as a failure: Look, the only people who care what you're doing are already in your club! But in fact, as they say in the software industry, this reciprocity is not a bug at all—it's a feature.

People who have no experience blogging often fail to understand the essentially social nature of the activity. Blogging is convivial. Bloggers commonly blog in groups, whether formally (as with our Salon bloggers) or simply through the haphazard accretion of casual connections. In these groups, what you contribute is obviously important; but so is where you choose to place your attention. Reading is as much a part of blogging as writing; listening is as important as speaking. This is what so many bloggers mean when they claim that "blogging is a conversation": not that each post sparks a vigorous exchange of comments, but that every post exists in a context of post-and-response that stretches across some patch of the Web, link by link, blog to blog.