Writing to learn: Blogs and and the worldmind

Scott Rosenberg claims learning theory shows most people learn by writing (teaching works for me as well). It is the act of making someone one's own that causes it to stick iin memory. He makes a logical connection to blogging:

Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment

...If this is true -- and, based on my own experience, I believe it is -- then we can view the explosion of writing in weblogs, of millions of people mastering ideas by writing about them, and spinning narratives in order to fix them in memory, as a vast exercise in the pursuit of collective self-knowledge. Yes, of course there are heaps of trivial pursuits, too; they keeps things lively. Only puritans would wish to eliminate them.

So hobby blogs aren't merely a wasteful pile of vanity; they're also a learning exercise. Alas for me, the learning I may thus be doing has no obvious connection to income.

On a slighly related tangent, however, I do think these blogs are doing something interesting in a different learning domain -- it feels as though blogs are amplifying, filtering, and extending the emergent intelligence of the net. Hence Google's affection for blogs; Google lives off the crude mind of the net. (also Adwords). If the net was a simple entity with a base IQ of 10 a few years ago, perhaps blogs have pushed it to 13 ...

Skynet cannot be far away :-).