Blogging the easy (and wrong) way

I think it’s time someone hit RESET on the whole blogging thing and everyone became educated about one simple ground rule.  Blogging is not just about passing on found information that you feel might interest others.   It is about many things but one thing that I would like to see agreement on is this.   If bloggers cannot be original and if they feel they must pass on the work of others, then they should take  the core message of that found information, agree or disagree with it, contribute some of their own thoughts and opinions, thereby adding value to the conversation that may have been launched by the writer of the original piece.   It seems to me too many bloggers are using blogs as elaborate Twitter pages.  Twitter I understand as a conduit for information found elsewhere, although I still believe you should in the 140 characters or less tell us why you feel the information is of interest or matters to the recipient(s).

I’ll tell why I’m riled up about this.  I read a book review on the New York Times website and the reviewer quoted a line from the book, a very witty line that I thought portrayed the author of the book as a clever person.  I Googled that line and I was surprised (yes, I might be very naive) to see that a blogger had cut and pasted that entire book review (including the author’s name, but not the publication) into their blog.  No commentary was added, no added value was evident to me.  Our collective knowledge had not been advanced.  The irony is that the book being reviewed posed a question about whether the Internet is changing the way we think.   Perhaps it’s making us think less.