At a meeting recently MIP of http://mip.typepad.com/ brought up the potential for blogs to serve as a communication medium. In the Tipping Point, the author proposed there are three types of communicators; mavens, connectors and salesmen.
Maven is from a Yiddish word meaning one who accumulates knowledge. The critical thing about mavens is they are not passive collectors of information, they want to share it. Apparently there has been lots of research about mavens.
Connectors are people who knows lots of people in many different contexts and works at keeping on touch. They just really like people and value and nurture weak links as well as strong links.
Salesmen are defined as persuaders. They have an interesting experiment on persuasion which will be the subject of a separate post.
So what is the purpose of my blogging. I expect it is primarily Maven. I am trying share things with people. Of course, in some ways I am trying to persuade you of my point of view and trying to make connections with readers of this blog.
However the experiments and research on all these type are most fascinating and I will report on some of the stories in other blogs.