After I started the Jolly Digest yesterday Joe Carter was kind enough to link to me in his Outtakes, then I found that Warren at View from the Pew has been inspired to begin a Blogroll Cruise. Joe has encouraged us to do this and has taken the lead in it, but the biggest push for this kind of "meta-blogging" is now coming from Brad at 21st Century Reformation and Joshua Whipps at RazorKiss. Brad's post called Links to the World – Church as Power Network has been foundational in showing the potential influence of meta-blogging. He gives an excellent graphic and commentary on how the power of networking increases the influence of blogging, and how this can serve as a model for the church. You can find the same post at Diaological Coffee House which is a new group blog that Brad is participating in.
Joshua Whipps at RazorKiss has taken some of Brad's insights, expanded on them and is offering practical suggestions on how to leverage this power of networking. Check out his Notes on the Ghetto - And Solutions, Solutions II, and Meta-Niching.
I'll leave it to you to read what Brad and Joshua have said, I couldn't say it any better. But I will throw in my two cents on this. Blogging has evolved and is evolving into a major communication medium, so therer are opportunities today that weren't there a year ago. I'll use myself as an example. When I started blogging I looked at it as an outlet. I'm one of those people who dreams of being a writer someday and blogging looked to me like a good avenue to start practicing. Also, as somoene has said, "writing makes an exact man," so I looked at it as a way of sharpening my own thoughts on many matters. In other words, I got into blogging with some very individualistic goals. But what I found once I started blogging was a new community. Today I feel a kind of bond with many fellow bloggers, a sense of responsibility toward them, and a sense that bloggers as a group have the potential to influence our world in ways we may not have thought of. Actually, in a nutshell, that's the whole point of Hugh's book.
In fact, the very fact that I would conclude that last sentence by referring to "Hugh's book," and not giving a full description of the title illustrates how we have built community over the last year or so. I know that, for the vast majority of my readers, the simple words "Hugh's book" are enough to identify who I am talking about. There are some out there who may need to know that I am talking about Hugh Hewitt and his book is called Blog, but most of my readers didn't need to hear that. We've already got our own little sub-culture where we know what books are hot and most of us feel like we are on a first name basis with Hugh at this point.
And this community is an ever expanding community that can be furthered if we follow Brad and Joshua's thoughts. But, as Hugh says, it is not merely community that is expanding through the blogosphere, but also influence. I am not sure that we are going to see a Christian Instapundit, as many of us have hoped for. But that's ok - as Joe and others have shown with their talk about the power of the long tail, when it comes to the influence of bloggers, the whole is greater than the sum of our parts.
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