Scanning the Internet today, I found a pair of pieces by writer and columnist Clive Thompson — one, for The Globe and Mail, another, for Wired magazine, that focus on how our brains get a boost when we’re using social media and blogging.

“The fact that so many of us are writing has changed the way we think,” he . “Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public.”

Granted, 90 percent of blog content out there is lousy, something . But our willingness to put our thinking out there, explain how we arrived at our positions and share the content that helped us along the way is advancing global knowledge, Thompson says.