Just watched Shane’s Blogging Idol Role Model video post and it got me thinking….which is sometimes dangerous.  We all talk about how business and IT should be more aligned, and yet I wonder how aligned Twitter, Facebook , Blogspot, WordPress, and the many other systems and servers were when they started up.  Was “social networking” a user-driven thing or was it a technology-driven opportunity?  (By the way, if to blog is a verb, is there an equivalent for Twitter – twitting or twittering – and are we all Facebooking ?)

Its actually hard to believe that we would be talking about Role Models for blogging already!  But MarkEvans’ points seem very valid from my personal experience, too.  I’m pretty much a Blogging Idol junkie, not a committed blogger - I hardly ever do any blogging other than this contest.  Don’t know why, but I do know its all about finding the ideas and then the time or motivation to be consistent, as Mark says.  And he asks the question:  what are you trying to get out of being a blogger?  I think that is the $64,000 question – what return do you get that makes the time spent worthwhile?  For some, its become part of their job.  For others it is really about networking.  And for the rest it may just be curiosity about a new kind of communictions. 

For me, there’s even an element of not wanting to get left behind in the IT Fast Lane.   Social networking has, after all, changed the way we do things and in some areas it has even taken over from email or the phone.  Today, I feel that it’s hard to keep in touch with all the new system – I’m only using Facebook, LinedIn, Twitter, email, iTunes, and I have a very boring, static website.   And yet I know people who have none of those, and hardly know what I’m talking about when I mention these services.  Are these people becoming the luddites of the Information Revolution?

So, if you add it all up, do we have a Paradign Shift?  More than one paradign shift?  Or perhaps even a new, “unshifted” paradigm?   What will happen when there are as many blogs as telephones or email addresses?  What might happen if we had “realtime” blogs connected to a wireless cam?  Are Twitter, Blogs and Websites just points on some new communications continuum?  

As usual, your opinions are valuable – is social networking a paradign shift?  What happens when everyone has a blog, a Facebook site, a Twitter account and a dozen others?