This blog post is not meant to be insightful or meant to share an opinion on any particular topics. It’s sole intent is to ask you your opinion. I have a question.

Is the casual style of writing that comes along with blogging a good thing or a bad thing for society?

Some times I still have my parents read over my writing and usually their reaction is that it’s too informal. I write like I speak and often times that means grammatical errors, slang terms, and off the cuff remarks. What’s the big deal? Well, recently there was a phenomenal blog post on the Fake Steve Jobs blog about ‘why mainstream media is dying’.Whoever the fake Steve Jobs is, he wrote…

And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the “real newspapers” all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we’re going to be just fine.

Part of it is the form of the media itself. If you’re a reporter at the Times, you get one story, and a fixed number of inches, and you’re smothered by layers of editors. At TechCrunch it’s one guy who can get his teeth into something and there’s no limit on how many articles he can do.

I love this. He points out that the agility of the informal publishing platform of a blog is what will allow so many people to eventually make the “standard” journalism world irrelevant. But back to the question, is this casual style bad for the overall reporting of news and how society consumes it?

I think not. I think that a less formal style of writing will eventually be the way that most of us consume the news. Obviously good writing will rise to the top, and that’s why I encourage current newspaper journalists to team up, leave their paper, and start a top notch blog with higher quality writing and coverage. But the print is going to die, it’s just a matter of time, and it would sure scare me to work in a known dying industry. But if that journalist is really good, they readers will come.

Penelope Trunk wrote a great post last month on why the internet has created a generation of great writers. Her last argument, which I really like…

Finally, for those of you who think students don’t know how to write in full sentences, you are the people who probably don’t understand how to use text as a persuasive medium.

In summary, I think that the style of writing that is most affective is changing. It’s more casual but like most successful things these days, it’s more personal, it’s more comfortable, and it’s more fun. Looks like I did end up sharing an opinion. But, like I stated at the start, what I want to know is what do you think? Is this style of writing that I employ and that so many others are beginning to use good or bad for readers?

image via flickr

Today, I have the opportunity of meeting author AJ Jacobs who wrote ‘The Know-It-All’ and ‘The Year of Living Biblically’. AJ writes with a very unique style. He lives out life experiments, like reading the entire encyclopedia, or living the bible as literally as possible, or outsourcing his entire life for a month, in order to share the personal reactions and affects of the experiment. I’ve started calling this style experiential writing and I’ve been inspired by it.

As you may or may not know I’ve decided to write a book over the next year (2009) in the same tone. I’ll write an experiential account of the entrepreneurial process. As I work to build SocialDreamium I’m going to record the feeling of dumping $2,000 bucks into the business just months before the wedding, or why I hate my lawyer and how to avoid that (I don’t hate my lawyer by the way, he’s a great guy). Everything I share will be raw and uncut and both helpful for the first or serial entrepreneur and also entertaining for the “nontrepreneur” and the non business folks.

I hope to learn a ton from AJ tomorrow and I’m very excited for the chance to meet him! AJ was one of the 12 people I chose this year to meet. Instead of doing New Years resolutions that never hold up I’ve decided to meet 12 fascinating people, he made the list and I’m excited to check him off of it.

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Check out the video below from the  TED Conference where AJ talks about some of the personal affects and outcomes of his life experiment!