Wednesday, September 23, 2009

On Blogging

I definitely shouldn't be blogging on blogging, but sometimes it's nice to just express an idea. Frankly, I suppose that's what blogging - for me - is all about.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been faithfully reading Climate Progress, a climate change blog, as part of a class I am taking on Environmental Science and Policy. If you follow the link you'll see a tremendous amount of content, and simply by reading the blog you can end up with a high-quality education on current climate issues pretty quickly. The problem? Reading the blog literally takes an hour out of my day - each day - and if I take a day off it takes even longer to catch up.

Joe, the main blogger, admits to "dictating all of [his] posts using Dragon NaturallySpeaking software," which probably accounts for part of the length. However, I think this is a symptom of climate change advocates in general. They have a ton of information, and in trying to put all (or most) of it into the public realm, they overwhelm the layman. I will try to follow Climate Progress even after the class is over, simply because it is such a wonderful source of information, but in all likelihood I won't be able to maintain an hour/day dedication to only one blog.

This is one reason, I think, that I (and so many others) really love MR. Tyler does a nice job of keeping his posts fairly short and his main page clean (Joe's long headlines are distracting and by providing me a lot of info, they become uninformative). There is definitely an opportunity, in my opinion, for a climate advocate to write a blog with a little less content that would be more easily digestable for the average citizen - is there one that I simply don't know exists?

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Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~Fredrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty