Catching up with some RSS feed reading this morning, I read Warren Bickford’s post at the IABC Cafe on the role of bloggers in the current Middle East crisis.

Warren references Lisa Goldman, a Canadian blogger in Israel. We were both impressed by Lisa, Warren – I talked about her, too, in my post last month on the most blogged war.

One of the comments to Warren’s post caught my attention in particular.

Marcus Ferrar (a long-time IABC member with whom I served on the board when I was director of IABC’s Europe Middle East Region a few years ago) defines blogging thus:

Blogging is another form of word of mouth transmission of news. It may contain at least as much nonsense as the mainstream media, but it works efficiently and is as old as the hills.

That’s the world we professional communicators have been living in for a long time, even if it has not always been apparent. Let’s use whatever channels are available to us. And as consumers: caveat emptor!

It may seem blindingly obvious. Yet where I keep seeing wordy and different statements all over the place that make it confusing for many people to get a grasp of blogging, that’s one of the better and more succinct definitions I’ve seen.

Marcus has a journalism background, he’s not a a blogger, yet he understands it!