Adapted from Source Image – http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2361/2237413458_0c6c841a10.jpg?v=1202008802

Doug Johnson (Blue Skunk Blog) challenges the gold star, let’s blog to be recognized approach, essentially saying that the mirror Dangerously Irrelevant blogger (Dr. Scott McLeod) holds up to the edublogosphere results in a “mirror image” of reality…distorting our sense of what really IS valuable.

Do we actually want competitive blogging? …Don’t bloggers most write for their own intrinsic reasons – to clarify their own thinking, to record their daily observations, to reflect willfully, to share selflessly, to constructively converse with those of both like and unlike minds?…But comparing… seems the antithesis of the “I’ll share mine if you share yours” world of personal learning networks. Do blogging awards and rankings have any positive uses?

Sure it does! It helps everyone re-examine WHY the blogging happens in the first place. As someone who’s blog made it to the top of the mountain (close enough), then slowly slipped down into obscurity (hey, I’m not ranked 13,000th in Technorati anymore), why AM I blogging?

Here’s the top 5 reasons for now:

1. Unlike anything else I’ve done, it represents my one achievement that shows I’m a lifelong learner. If I can point to nothing else, I can point to my blog and say, “Hey, who says I’m not a lifelong learner?” I didn’t know how to use GNU/Linux a few years ago and now I look back at my blog entries as a record of the journey. What a geek!
2. It helps me appreciate that learning is transitory. The more I blog, the more I realize, “Man, you really ARE ignorant! You can’t even remember what you wrote about 2 weeks ago but you take pride in the fact that someone is finding it useful!” The worst feeling is when I read something great, really great, that agrees with what I might say, and then I realize, *I* wrote it a few years ago. Isn’t that sweet?
3. I thought sharks had it bad, always have to swim forward to breathe, but now, I have to keep blogging to learn and remember what I’ve learned…it’s a bad habit that won’t go away. And, another thing, I used to worry about possessing my writing in one place, completely controlling it…now, I don’t care. I want it to appear EVERYWHERE (CC-SA-NC-Attrib). What a junkie!
4. Having an online record of what I’ve learned helps me with my writing. I was writing an article the other day and had NOTHING to write about (yeah, it happens). What did I do? I went back 2-3 years in my blog to find a few posts and then stitched them together. Wow, I’d read writers would use their journals that way but never imagined I’d get a blog and use it that way! When I get to thinking, “Sheesh this is tough,” I google myself and then get enthused all over again. It’s like reading “happy notes” from the past.
5. Conversation? Sheesh, I’m happy to write down my conversation with myself, survive the onslaught of email and make notes…I’m grateful someone takes time to comment as I hurtle past them to the floor of the crevasse a few miles below. No seriously, it allows me to share my perspective on points of view that no one–let’s be honest–would listen to me if I sat down with them and chatted face to face. I recognize my voice is different in writing and part of the journey is reconciling the two. That said, I’m grateful that people subscribe and listen to the online voice, while others prefer the face to face.

The following might be critical, inaccurate…but I’m going to throw it out there. If it’s wrong, someone will set me straight, right? That’s another value to the blogosphere.

Anyone who keeps looking at their readership stats hasn’t quite internalized the value of their own writing…they’re still trying to justify it to the rest of the world. Knowing that some bloggers have had to justify their blogging to their employers, could that be what’s motivating the analysis? Of course, the flip side is that the analysis is needed since every perspective provides some insight, even if to show the value of what is assessed.

Nothing wrong with that, just be transparent about it. We all like positive strokes from time to time.

How about you?

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