totally evolved
In a follow-up to my earlier post about the cyclical attention the world pays to your own issues as an individual, it's striking me via the latest dialogue in scoble's weblog that having a blog really exposes how evolved you are.
The echo chamber can be defined as a system which encourages links back to itself and discourages external links. The mechanism for encouragement or discouragement could be technical (such as requiring logon) or social (such as nepotism). The directory at Microsoft is a classic example of a technically limiting factor. If you're name doesn't "resolve" it's hard to get things done. Hard to set up meetings, hard to join groups. You might as well use an external e-mail address during this stage. What this means is that during the time when new people most need to hit the ground running, they're faced with this obstacle. Often a new person is hired to get a team out of self referenial state. Then they have to wait for this new person to become part of "self" (in this example, the outlook directory). That makes for an echo chamber environment: you only hear from people you already hear from.
By soliciting such wide outside commentary, blogs are inherently NOT echo chambers, and this is what brings out the best and the worst in people, and keeps things interesting.