Leaf Cutter Ants as a Metaphor for Bloggers

I was musing over a discussion I had with Rusty Shackleford from My Pet Jawa recently when I achieved an epiphany about bloggers. We're the information equivalent of leaf cutter ants!

Each of us brings a little bit of information and insight into the overall blogosphere to make a much greater whole.

Rusty very kindly linked to my little focus group effort comparing a candid video of soldiers handing out soccer balls to Iraqi kids and a heavily produced video of the Army Corps of Engineers construction of a kindergarten in Iraq. Rusty thought it was more important to show videos of military victory.

Personally, I think the most important message to get out to the American public is that we are winning, not that we are nice.

I understand his point of view, but would argue that we need more than that. From a market segmentation point of view, showing cool videos of Islamofascists getting smeared will only work with one segment of the populace. There's another that needs to see soccer balls and soldiers dancing with the kids. That's when I came up with the leaf cutter ant analogy.

Despite my frequent deviations into snarkiness, the goal of this blog is to show that kindness and cooperation is the foundation of civilization. Rusty's point seems to be that an unprotected civilization is doomed. Both are right, but it's hard to do both well on the same blog and so each blog has its individual purpose for the greater good. One of us carries a bit of leaf with World of Good stories and the other carries a bit with signs of success against the Islamofascists.

The result? A relocated rubber tree plant.

Sorry, I couldn't resist posting this when I found it. :-)