Barbara Ganning makes an interesting comment about the social importance of blogging.

We can use technology to bring people together rather than to isolate them further into themselves through using social software to connect communities, through the age-old community-building friendship-bonding, extended ruminating, reflective practices such as letter writing.

And that's the promise right there, I think, of blogs in the Blogging the World Project--not just to give students a space to gather their thoughts about their own, particular, separate immersive experience abroad, but to connect with one another, student in Russia with student in Germany, say, and to reach out and say, this is what is happening here, and this is what blogging seems to mean and how it feels.