John Moore alerts us to Ton Zylstra's ponderings on Lilia's observation of blog contents and wonders if perhaps there's a need to nudge the ship of blogdom into modes of making actionable sense:

The problem I think is that for both those steps, digesting the results of exploration, and making actionable sense of them, we should bring our co-discoverers, i.e. the bloggers, along for the ride, but by and large still fail to do so.

We together came up with the idea, so why should we not together turn it into action? Current reality is that we try to feed the ideas into our regular workflow, and try to bring our colleagues into it.

I'm not at all sure that we do fail. I think it was Linus Pauling who said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

The Sense of Touch

This is the lesson and the role of the blog. I wouldn't worry too much when blogs seem little more than brain-dumps, because, apart from the space-bending properties of the technology and looked at only by the content, the thoughtful blogs (as opposed to the guidance and content review blogs) are brain dumps.

By the very free and open access nature of the tools, blogs are un-edited, non-peer-reviewed and openly and frequently published in a Kerouac stream-of-consciousness. Blogs are the signal traces from first-person neurons firing on the surface of humanity's skin. But apart from certain reflex actions, the story too big not to blog phenomenon, it is not the role of the skin to control the behaviour of the animal, that is the role of deeper processing. The role of the skin is only to sweep out and touch what is possible. It's up to other faculties to put that sense to practical use.

I have seen more examples of this than I can count, the most recent being all these actions surrounding blog-spam handling and my recent posts on RSS vs Conditional-GET. Blogs are the dashboard lights, amplified and extended to all blogdom by the technology of the infrastructure, and it's when the lights go on that the actionable response is considered.

Practice Armed Defence Daily

So I'm not worried. Long time ago I had a page on my company site called "Unsold Ideas" and that pretty much describes certain categories of this blog's content. When Bucky Fuller filed a patent and discovered someone else was already working on that solution, he said that this was serendipidous as it would save him all that R&D work; I feel the same way.

By generating public ideas, my blog seeds several roles in the technology process. First, it tests to see if there are others who have already built what I would like to see realized. Second, it can prompt someone else to take my idea and run with it on their own thereby saving me all that work, or they might shoot it down completely, or, most often, there's a dialog that leads to develop and explore the space of the idea. Third, and there's no doubt more I'm not enumerating, I have a famously bad memory for certain types of data, and if I don't put it into my blog, I'll forget it.

Oh, and I like to imagine technologies, maybe more than actually building them.

Back to actionable sense and the outcome of the blog-dumps, this, I believe, is an inevitable outcome of all blog-reading. Knowledge is only additive, you cannot remove knowledge, you can only add to it. We read each other's stories and make an implicit actionable sense in that we are confrontied with a need to assimmilate what they've said, or to accommodate it into our world model (which may mean to dismiss it), but we're still taking a mental action that changes the way we've previously thought about the issue.

Thus, when I read a blog on someone's tribulations with their kids, I learn something I didn't have before. If I learn how to do a CSS hack or get handed some hard questions about business process, I can ignore them, but I cannot roll back the tape and erase having read them. Blogs spawn dialog and discourse and while that may seem endless, the truth as exposed by the history of academia shows that we just never know what might become important someday.

Work = Action / Distance

Back at practicalities, as I noted, there are countless instances of social software leading to real tangible action, maybe not through the humanity-skin of the blogs, but through byproduct associations born of the connections we make through being inter-related by our blog-readings. Ecademy, Ryze and MeetUps hold their live get-togethers that lead to new business and personal relationships, wikis like the RESTwiki devise plans, documents and open standards, and rallying points like JOHO and Mutualism -- these are all examples of the spontenous action groups who appear in the wake of shared ideas.

So I wouldn't be worried about nudging sense out of the great glut of 10 million blogs posting a paragraph nearly twice a second; that's why we have blogdex, google and technorati, and, if you ask me, the reason those dump-mining services have risen to the fore so rapidly is because we have an implicit need for the raw materials to make our own personal actionable senses.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

We really don't need to go very far to understand how this skin phenomenon works. Way back there at my first paragraph, my blog's blogroll posted the touch-signal star by John's blog, who'd touched and amplified Ton, who'd touched and amplified Lilia's original dismay over the meandering of blog content. It is the meanderings that have connected all of us.

I'd also been thinking this morning, reading over the many comments on my blog-spam item, thinking how I've never written a book and yet, by the grace of the gods and given time, there's probably already two or three books worth scattered in pieces over those past many months of archives, several more in my collected emails, notes, articles and other idea fragments.

But the thing is, the thing that always stops me from cracking a book doctype in my word processessor, the grand obstacle is simply, would half as many people read any of this if it was diligently ironed out droll, flat and linear, partitioned by topic domain, bound to a dead tree and offered on a shelf with a price tag?

The loose ends offer me a sense of the possible, a landscape that can go anywhere, a sense of adventure that keeps coaxing me back to explore a little more. I wouldn't want it tidied up in a tight focused and deadlined bundle because I know, philosophically, to do so would require closing off many of these possibilities, discarding the undiscovered territories. It's an ongoing story, a story of ideas, a story of what's needed, what's possible, a story of senses where there's no way to end the plotline, no way to limit the cast and no way to cut it off in time for the capping colophon. Unhemmed as it is uneven.