The Power of Blogs

The real power of blogs lies in their capability to store, organize, and retrieve information. When blogging software first became accessible, people quickly realized the publishing program's potential for using links to store random bits of information found while surfing the Web. A person searching the Web for information about gardening could clip and store any news stories, scientific papers, book reviews, or journal articles on his blog and know that he could access it easily. This discovery gave birth to extra ways of using the system. People could share their online discoveries by linking to a website and writing commentary around them. Others liked to create personal diary entries, never really expecting others to read their writing.

The result became a "hive mind" where everything was connected a few short clicks from one another. People began to see blogs as a research resource. The world of blogs as a collective group is called a blogosphere or blogland. Why go to the trouble of performing a search using a variety of search engines and databases when you can benefit from the information someone else had already discovered?