Blogs transcend borders, languages and cultural differences because “fill in the gap”

How would you complete our headline?

Blogs themselves cannot transcend borders or cultures but people can, and people are. People are creating blogs at the rate of 100,000 every day and Technorati is now tracking 57 million blogs overall. And people are because blogging is a multi-mode communications medium where you can use the written word, graphics, audio, video and animation to connect and tickle the senses and synapses of your fans, friends, community, customers, partners, vendors, readers, associates, peers, professionals, associations, someone please stop me!. People are because blogs let you connect with other people from all walks of life, anyplace, anytime, in any subject, and in most any modality. As long as you’ve got a way to participate (including consumption and simple commenting) you’ve got a place at the table. Good ideas and content still trump status or position in the ‘real world’ and anyone can become a someone with an important voice. If blogging was about nothing more than reading and writing it would be powerful. I would never underestimate the power of the written word, but the thing is, you have to get people to read for it to have any effect! Without the kicker of other presentation formats like podcasting and video blogging, blogging would lack the pop culture appeal to become a super mass medium like T.V.

Blogs are borderless

I’m always happy to experience another example of how blogs can help us traverse borders and cultural differences in life - even languages. I have found that the more people you interact with, the richer your life becomes. There’s a modifier and accelerator to this experience. The more dissimilar people are to you or your own experience, the more you can expand your mind and perspective. Travel does this for us, be it the fully immersive, in-person version (the kind where a passport is especially handy) or a virtual version made possible by the web - like blogging. Just last week I saw a link coming in to EXCELER8ion from a blog called ‘Bloggingham.’ I went to Bloggingham and was happily surprised to find it published in a different language (Danish as it turns out). Not that this is the first time a foreign language blog has linked to us, but I am always excited by this none-the-less. Jonas of Nottingham, as I’ll call him, added us to his blog roll and quoted Shannon in a recent post. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t tell exactly what language Bloggingham was written in (it looked Germanic and that’s as far as I got). Every attempt of mine to translate the site failed. Without a way to translate the site I was at a loss to read Bloggingham which left me chagrined. I wanted to get to know a little more about Jonas. Given that Jonas clearly had no problem reading our blog (or maybe he just has a working translation tool), I put it in my mind to send him an e-mail. Before I got too far in contacting Jonas I saw this great image on his blog about what blogging means to different people:

Even though the blog post on Bloggingham was in Dutch, I could see that the collage was in English and I wanted to know more about it. I saw that a reader of Bloggingham Trine-Maria had posted a comment and linked to what appeared to be the original PDF document. The file is published on CK’s blog (Christina Kerley) with the related story here. In quick succession I had jumped from one Danish blog (Bloggingham) to another (hovedetpaabloggenblog) and on to a U.S. Marketing blog (CK’s blog). Talk about flattening the world - try that one out before blogs were mainstream.

People make connections - blogs are facilitators

Back to the human aspect and the human network. If Jonas of Nottingham didn’t bother to check his blog stats and notice all the traffic coming from English speaking countries he probably wouldn’t have put this post up, declaring his intent to start publishing in English. Which brings me to the point about blogs that I want to drive home and put in the carport for the night. It’s about people. And yes, I “get it” that it’s still a minority of people, and hopefully I’ve addressed that point by my comments on how blogging is a multi-mode medium.
So here’s my version of that headline:

Blogs transcend borders, languages and cultural differences because people power blogs

So what’s your version? If you can think of some to add I’ll group them up and send them over to CK for us.
–Julian