It’s weird that people have the idea that thinking out loud is a new idea for blogging. That’s because when journalists first heard about blogging they decided that it’s what they do. People who write publicly for money, mostly without any principle other than getting paid for writing, or perhaps “building a brand.” That imho was not what was going on. It was people asking questions, often in the form of statements they weren’t sure of. Put it out there, see what comes back. At its best it was what I called sources go direct — where people with expertise shared what they knew so we could learn from them. So the idea of a public “garden” is just a response to journalists getting the story totally wrong about blogging in the early days. Amazing how these things cycle round and round often because of basic misunderstandings like this. #