The author's dead, long live the blogger

I want to elaborate a little on Will and Barbara's assertion that "Writing stops, blogging, continues." My position is that writing, like blogging, continues. As a reader I interact with the words on the (real or virtual) page inventing a response. It is the author who is dead, not the words. Through death, the author gives life to the blogger.

To quote Ken Smith in Stephen Downes' definitive Educational Blogging: "Blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others." My blog gives me a place to archive my responses. Barbara insightfully highlights the metacognitive benefits of blogging when she quotes Forster from Aspects of the Novel: "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

But, what is really exciting is that, to quote Smith in Downes again:

If you keep at it, others will eventually write down what they think when they read you, and you'll enter a new realm of blogging, a new realm of human connection.

Blogging is connecting.