Blog Tipping

In the last week, I've spent quite a lot of time on airplanes. I've traveled from San Diego to Nashville, from Nashville to Detroit, and from Detroit back to San Diego with stops in LA, Dallas, and Chicago. If you're going to spend that much time sitting in one place, you'd best have your entertainments ready. In my case, that means having on hand The New York Times Crossword (or ten) and a good book.

On my journeys east and north, I read Blink, the current bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell. For the journey home, I bought Gladwell's earlier work Tipping Point. I was restless on the flight home -- in this case, San Diego -- and read only seventy pages before my eyes lost focus, but those seventy pages lead to some interesting thought.

This morning, freshly returned to San Diego, I checked my e-mail and discovered that a good friend whose writing I once edited for weekly publication has started a blog. I am no longer the middleman between Chris' writing and his venue; blogging has afforded him a place for his voice. Which is a good thing. And a Tipping Point thing.

Blogs are getting a lot of attention lately for their number and variety in a relatively short time span. Had you asked Chris to predict that I'd have a blog this early in the phenomenon, he'd have denied the possibility. I am, as he put it, not the fastest to catch up with technology. In Nashville, I still have a dial-up internet connection. But in San Diego, with better access and more free time, I caught the blog wave. And an interesting thing happened. Within days my whole family was blogging. And now Chris is too.

What is interesting about this, and what brings me back to Tipping Point, is that someone Chris has never met is, at heart, responsible for his entrance into the blogosphere: my friend Anne-Geri. Without Anne-Geri there would be no Chris, because it was Anne-Geri's blog that inspired mine, mine that inspired my mother's, and my mother's that inspired Chris'.

Chapter Two of Tipping Point is titled "The Law of the Few" and it outlines three types of people who are critical to social epidemics of all kinds: connectors, mavens, and salesmen. Anne-Geri is a connector. A teacher, a gardener, a charity-walker, a mission-goer, an actress, a writer, an internet hound, a believer, and a friend, Anne-Geri has her foot in many different worlds and has that "special gift for bringing the world together."

There is a lot of book left to read and I'm sure that I'll recognize others along the way. But for now, I'm remembering fondly a show performed in Nashville last October. Because Blithe Spirit introduced me to Anne-Geri, and without that introduction, I would not daily hear the voices of my mother, brother, and friend through their blogs. They would not have one. Because, without Anne-G, I would not have had one.