Blogging as Conversation

Tor, my favorite fantasy/sf publisher, has just gone public with their new Web site, one that has been re-designed with community engagement with content as a core principle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor, and one of the founding bloggers at Making Light, has a fabulous essay on blogging.

In the blog post Nielsen Hayden opens with this simple but elegant explanation of the core concept behind blogging and community content:

Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Go read the rest of his post; it’s one of the best meditations on blogging and digital communication I’ve ever read.