Thanks to a post entitled “A Year in the Spiral” by Britt Watwood of Virginia Commonwealth University, I’ve got a new way of thinking about my latest leap into the world of social media.

Both his own end-of-year reflections on his experiences within the “Social Media Spiral”, as well a post  by Michele Martin (the original source of the accompanying graphic) mentioned many of the constellation of tools and practices that I’m already well into the habit of using.

Britt writes, “I saw myself in that spiral, and recognized that to grow, I needed to move higher up …”

What I’ve discovered in the short time since I’ve begun to branch out beyond my core set of familiar tools to document my meanderings around the web is that writing (and reflecting) in the format of blog posts is … different.  (Is this my blog-ha moment?)  Just how this plays out is something that perhaps I’ll be able to be a bit more articulate about in the coming months.

So far I’m struck mainly by the unexpected difference between having read who knows how many hundreds — nope, gotta be thousands — of blog posts over the past few years, and the act of starting to write them myself.  Sounds trite, no doubt.  But I really had the impression that having logged that many hours, I was “quite familiar” with blogging.

Hah! New discoveries abound, and they are just beginning.

I had noticed that other bloggers tend to highlight milestones in their blogging experience, but now I’m starting to have glimmers of what might those milestones really mean.

I’m also intrigued by exploring “ways to do blog-like publishing in things that are not blogs.”

Onward …