Plenty of people have written blog posts about why they blog. It might be to make money, to stay in touch with family and friends, to convince other people of certain opinions, or, the writer’s answer, because they must. However, not a lot seems to be written about why people read other people’s blogs. A comment on a blog post yesterday made me stop and think about this a little bit more.

In response to my blog post, Sky of Blue, and Sea of Green – The New Normal #iranelection, Maria from Maria Michelle's Furkids and Animal Rescue commented about how my post had gotten her thinking about how our lives change.

I believe I first came across Maria’s blog through EntreCard. EntreCard is a site where you can list your blog and find other participating blogs. You have a card that you display on your site, and you drop your card on other participating sites. One of the biggest criticisms of EntreCard is that people ‘drop and run’. They find the place to drop their card, and move on without looking closely at the site they’ve visited. I’ll admit that I often just skim a page before moving on.

Looking at the statistics on my site, the average EntreCard visitor spends 38 seconds on my site, and I suspect that is higher than for many people because my site is slow at loading. 95% of them look at the site and move on without looking at anything else and 60% of them are people that have visited my site.

With that, it is tempting to abandon EntreCard if all you are looking for is more (and perhaps better) traffic. Yet my recent blog post has gotten Maria thinking, and her Monday Grump Tests often bring a smile to my face, so I thought I’d explore a little bit more what I get out of what I read in social media.

A friend in a neighboring town last year tweeted about Rich Farm Ice Cream Shop in Oxford, CT which has become a favorite place to get ice cream for our family. It think it was either from him, or from someone that he introduced me to online that I learn that They Might Be Giants was putting on a free concert on the New Haven Green, which I attended with my family.

Then, today, I read someone’s blog post about going strawberry picking. (I apologize for not remembering the blog and providing a link. If you think it was your blog, leave me a comment). It seems like every August we end up talking about how it would have been great to have gone strawberry picking, but we didn’t think about it until after the season was over. Well, at least here in Connecticut, it is peak strawberry picking season, and if we can get a decent day and people are healthy enough, we will visit one of the local strawberry fields.

So, one important theme is getting more closely connected with things going on around us. I like it when social media helps me do that.

Another important theme is getting better information. Hopefully, some of my blog posts, whether they be about local school board meetings, bills being considered at the State Capitol, or developments in Iran will help people be a little better informed, and again, a little more involved. I know that my technology related posts get a lot of traffic and I hope that they help others figure out how to solve some technological problem. I know that other people’s posts about how they solved technical problems has often helped me immensely.

With that, I would like to highlight a few different blog posts and other sites that help share information that I think it is important to help get out. First, I want to point to a blog post on DailyKos. I am much less involved with DailyKos than I used to be for a large variety of reasons, but I think Adam Siegel posts, Michele's Snapping Some Peas captures a wonderful mix of the local action, especially in the gardens, as it relates to the national stage.

Over on the Sunlight Foundation blog, Clay Johnson has a great blog post about how they are going to bid Recovery.gov.

We together-- not just we meaning The Sunlight Foundation-- are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related website.

I learned about this from Steven Clift at e-democracy.org and think it is a wonderful idea. I hope I can find some time to join the discussion about that idea.

Taking transparency even further, I received an email from Talking Points Memo about how they, together with Pro Publica and the New York Times, have received a Knight Foundation Grant to start documentcloud.org which “will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web”. Another very interesting project, that might fit very nicely with the Sunlight Foundation project.

So, these are a few things that I’ve gotten from social media recently. What do you get from social media? I’m especially interested in finding out from everyone on EntreCard or Adgitize that visits my site and then moves on.