Just finished reading and excellent bog on “Why Blog” and it’s a shame that ITW’s Blog Idol 2010 is coming to an end, nonetheless I thought I’d toss in my 2 cents on why I think people should read blogs. Personally I think there are 3 primary reasons, these are:

1. To learn. If you are like me, 90% (unscientific assumption) of the time you fall into this category. Blogs have created an avenue for many millions of people to share experiences, opinions, views and information on any topic that comes to mind. As a person who loves to analyze, review, and learn about new products and trends I am constantly seeking blogs and blogger’s opinions and views which provide me with independent (both biased and unbiased) insight(s) that may affect my decisions about a company, product, news stories, etc.

2. To collaborate. Team blogging (probably about 20% of people..and growing) are drawn to umbrella sites like lifehacker, gizmodo, gawker, even ITW to join with other like minded bloggers. The most famous of these is (IMHO) by far Wikipdeia where I’ve heard it said that less than 1% of everyone on the internet had made an entry or contributed to one, yet with Internet usage at over 1.8 billion that equates to over 18 million collaborators… It’s my hope that more people will add their opinions to the internet – ideally in broader formats than the sentence fragments that make up twitter and facebook…

3. To participate. We blog to communicate. As a blogger nothing excites more more than when someone responds. This means I have done more than grandstand on my $2 soapbox (or $1K Thinkpad as it may be…) this means people are interested – for or against – in what I have said enough to respond in kind. This is (again based on a less than scientific est.) the smallest % of bloggees (I’d wager <2% of readers based on my experience with my personal blog and what I’ve seen on BlogIdol.ca) but the time spent responding helps shape ideas, topics and opinion of all who participate.

Please keep blogging, sharing, reviewing, and posting ideas on your own, with others and in forums. Blogging is social democracy and freedom of speech at its best, it’s also a way in unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the past to combine, transmit and collect thoughts across the 6 billion people who make up our tiny spec of real-estate in the universe.

And just in case you wondered…yes, I know my math doesn’t equate to an even 100%, its b/c many people do more than one of the activities above…