Blogging on a regular basis can be an extremely satisfying endeavor. Yet the prevalence of sites, rather blogs, that blog about blogging tools and techniques, for example, how to increase your blog traffic or how to make money blogging: x easy steps, make for incredibly trivial reading. I’ll resist the urge to link drop.

Well-intentioned bloggers who ultimately become preoccupied with the mechanics of blogging optimization and the systematic monetization of material, I think, miss the point. Fiddling with widgets, plugins, and many of the popular social networking aggregation tools can be fun initially, but eventually they only distract us from the real purpose of a blog, which is writing and conveying thoughts.
In fact, blogging has the capacity to function as a creative/critical thinking outlet for expressing and sharing ideas. In many ways blogging can foster ideation, supplement traditional brainstorming techniques, even open up the problem solving process among colleagues to include more conversational dynamics.

Blogging isn’t solely about SEO, traffic generation, and banner AD revenue—unless that’s your thing. Rather, the bigger and arguably untapped potential of blogging lies with connecting people who might not otherwise be in a position to connect with one another.

Fundamentally a blog [is a place to] post thoughts, ideas, and links to stimulate thought and accelerate the transfer of ideas (via Perceptric).

As we’ve seen in recent months by the events unfolding in the Middle East, blogging, and to a larger extent social media networks, have played a significant role in mobilizing groups of people with shared political and ideological views. The socially-centric Web and blogosphere have become a relatively barrier-free environment for open expression and public dialogue.

It’s beginning to feel as though 2011 will go down in history as the decisive moment the Web truly became socially aware as a medium, liberating people en masse from politically oppressive regimes. Indeed, the blogosphere has ushered in a new era of open communication where none previously existed, in all its widget SEO optimized aggregation-idea-repurposing meta glory.