A blog is a tool. There is no such thing as "a blogger," or someone who can be rationally defined by their ability to use a blog, no more so than there are "wordists," people who define themselves based on their ability to use MS Word. The number of people who blog is now so large, and the things they blog about and the reasons they use blogs so diverse, that classifying someone as a blogger doesn't makes sense.
This wasn't always the case. When things are new, early adopters may refer to themselves as users of a certain communications tool or medium, though this phenomenon has been quite pronounced in social media. Witness "I am a blogger." "I am a podcaster," etc.
A-List blogger? Who are the A-List Wordists? There are none. There are obviously thousands of important and influential writers throughout history, and there continue to be, but they are not known as tabletists, papyrists, typewriterists, etc. And there's the rub. The maniacal focus on mastering the tool is a distraction from the larger obligation of using the tool to express something useful, informative, inspiring or amusing.
To test whether a statement is mere toolery, try a simple word substitution. For "What is your blogging strategy?" substitute any established communications tool. "What is your MS Word strategy?" or better still, throw in a household object. "What is your spatula strategy?"
An interesting relationship soon becomes clear. The more commonplace and widely adopted something is, the sillier it sounds in that construct. When a communications tool is new, or not widely used and understood, we talk about it as if it were a strategy. Later, it becomes a tactic or a tool.
In other words, during the early phases of adoption, we talk about things in irrational terms.
So, for a communications tool, what is early adoption? Microsoft estimates there are "500 million Office users worldwide." Presumably, all of them use Word. That's a half billion people, or with a global population of around 6.6B, around 13% of people on the planet. In the early adoption stage? Nope.
What about blogs? Technorati's April, 2007 State of the Blogosphere (the latest I could find) says there were 70 million blogs, growing at 120,000 a day. At a constant growth rate, there would be around 114 million today.
And TwitDir estimates there are 1,639,607 Twitter users. Much as many of us on Twitter would like to think we are early adopters (read: elite, ahead of the game, cool geeks, the in crowd, technologists), it's probably no longer true.
Is there really any point, anymore, to referring to someone as a blogger? Or are bloggers perhaps better referred to as business people, musicians, artists, students, writers, poets, critics, or whatever else they actually are, as opposed to what communications tool they have chosen to use?
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