Blogging for the real world

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to spend the weekend in Dorset doing some charity work. Much as I love London, it was great to get out of the City into the countryside for a bit of a break from the fast-paced city life.

As an added bonus, we were in the middle of nowhere and could barely get any phone reception, let alone an internet connection. This meant that there was no way of keeping up with the blogosphere, Twitter, or emails.

It was great to get away from it all - even if for just a weekend.

This sentiment rang even truer given the book I took away with me to read: We Think by Charles Leadbeater. It seemed to me, reading in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere under a lazy blue sky, that Leadbeater could have done with stepping outside his office more often.

Don't get me wrong - We Think is a great book. It explores plenty of the issues surrounding the new ways of working that the internet has brought about and the challenges we will all face in the future in light of this. Leadbeater also avoids using overly complicated language for the sake of it and uses simple terms and descriptions to get across his ideas (a big tick in my box).

But - and I think this is a problem with academia in general - it seems to be less rooted in the real world with concrete examples of how to apply the theories put forward to the real world, and more as a piece of academia written for academia's sake.

You could argue that the same happens to the blogosphere - blog comments just come from bloggers commenting on each others blogs. Twitter is an extension of this; bloggers commenting on issues - not on each others blogs, but on Twitter (could it be argued that Twitter is a post and every Tweet a comment underneath it?)

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a much better book - for me anyway. It is written ion the same simple language as We Think, but the ideas it puts forward are much more rooted in the real world, concrete examples and case studies are explored in depth, and - most importantly - it is discussed how these examples can help us in our everyday business and personal lives and what we can take from these examples. Shirky has stepped outside his office into the real world, but then brought it back to write the book, and finally tailored it to be put back out into the real world.

This is a lesson that I'm hoping to take to my blog. I'm going to try and root every blog post in the real world, giving examples of how readers can apply the ideas given to their work and personal lives. It may be a tall order - not every blog post will appropriate or useful - but it's a good ideal to work towards.

As for stepping outside the online bubble? I think I'm pretty good at that anyway, but will try to keep on keeping on and getting out into the real world. This may seem hypocritical coming from someone who's paid to do online PR, but to keep things even more in perspective, read this unbelievably true blog post from Jeremy Pepper.

The kids I was helping this weekend have gone through so much more than you or I probably ever will, so just bear in the back of your mind the next time you're still reading blogs at 2am that it just doesn't matter.