It’s rare for me to miss a few days but the simple truth I am too wrapped up in the rebuild of one ‘storyline’ in the OU Business School website.

This and preparing another presentation, this time on ‘blogging’ having opened what will become a series with ‘Social Media’ last week.

I see three necessary phases in becoming a blogger:

• Listen
• Comment
• Create (and collaborate)

‘Listen’ as in reading loads, being led wherever someone appeals to you, ‘listening in’ on the conversations that are being started and saving these sites to peruse regularly.

There were over 150 million blogs the last time I cared to seek out the statistics. How do you even begin to find those few that you are prepared to read on a regular basis? Clearly you cannot read everything; even in your own field of interest, unless it is the tightest niche, might have thousands of commentors.

I go for ‘like minds’, authors with whom you feel you could converse, those you wish to emulate, whose thoughts maybe like your own, but fully fledged.

I am currently following Andrew Sullivan a bit, but some of the many other bloggers he lists a lot.

Andrew is British born and raised, though living in New York, somewhat right-wing and from a modest background. His intellect and presumption took him to Oxford (Modern History) and then Harvard. By all accounts, with 1,000,000 page views a month he has many followers. He does this by a) being well informed and b) being willing to express an opion – we look to commentators for ‘breaking views’ as another Oxford graduate of this same era puts it, though Hugo Dixon, a grandson ( or great grandson) of Winston Churchill has a somewhat different background.

What they had in common as undergraduates was a precocious desire to express their opinion.

Is it any wonder that we are attracted to their words, if only to disagree? They make a convincing point succintly.

I’m clicking through the 60+ blogs Andrew Sullivan lists in his blogroll and find it hard not to click the ‘save bookmark’ option.

Nice when someone has done it for you, though I am yet to come across the UK equivalent.

Any suggestions?