Hasta La Creative!

Over a leisurely lunch at a Sellwood Public House yesterday, Tom Bennett, Digital Strategy Director for The New Group in Portland, said blogging is a selfish act. That got my attention.

I babbled defensively for a moment before proposing that we debate the proposition on our respective blahgs.

Last night, Tom typed his opening salvo. It’s well written and disarming, but for the sake of argument, I’ll see what I can do with his main premise.

A couple of years ago I impulsively blurted out the fact that Blogging is an inherently selfish act. This occured about 2 feet in front of James Keller, who at the time was working at YRG. This elicited a shrug and perhaps a bit of a sneer, because this of course could have been construed as a criticism of a sort.

Things have changed for everyone in the last couple of years. Blogging is ever more prevalent and an accepted outlet for many. But I still feel we are all in some way “selfish” in what we are doing. It now just becomes a matter of defining selfish, as it may mean vastly different things depending on who you ask.

Oddly enough, it’s the word “selfless” that comes to mind when I think of all the content being created by bloggers for FREE. Granted not all of it’s worth paying for, much less reading. Yet, there are now tens of thousands of blogs that do provide excellent FREE content.