There’s always some stimulus to write a post about something. It may come from something you read, something that comes up in physical conversation, something you see while surfing the web, whatever. And sometimes it’s none of these, it’s your personal muse.
I tend to think of this stimulus, this spark, as the thing that sets the snowball off. And I wish I had a word for it, like pearls have nacre. I don’t want to use nacre because likening blogs to pearls feels a bit presumptuous. Yet stimulus and spark and root and words like that don’t feel right either.
The sense I’m trying to capture is one which shows the opensource and shared and emergent and free and growing and energetic and creative nature of ideas in blogs, something that snowball captures well. What do we call this thing that starts a snowball? Doc, anyone else, any ideas?