Dina Mehta on Writing Blog Posts

Here is an excellent short piece on the creativity and free association that goes into making good blog post. Dina Mehta gives some anecdotes around creating blogs and then does some analysis of the creative flow. It is a good counter point to the series on the types of blogs by Amy Gahran that I posted on yesterday. Dina offers this nice example:

“In this case, I read a piece by Lilia titled 'Weblog as a Pen' in my news aggregator and my mind went off on a tangent and evoked images from Avi's post on 'The Pen' that he had written almost 3 weeks ago. I went over to Lilia's blog to leave a comment at her post and leave a pointer to Avi's there - thought she might enjoy it. Then i thought to myself it is something that i'd like to blog too - so i edited down my comment at Lilia's post to a few words, started with quoting Lilia's piece and went on to Avi's thoughts. Perhaps the researcher in me said 'more' - and i then did a search on Google on more expressions of a Pen - and found the piece on Pen as a metaphor. Which immediately made me remember Dave Pollard's recent post on metaphors, where he debates the use of metaphors”

…and she offers a bit of Dave Pollard’s post on metaphor. This all reminds me of work I did on metaphor as a developmental psychologist but that would be a too long story to tell here. However, it does give me an idea for a future post.