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> "I know writing is good for me. But why write for other people, why open myself up like this? If it's all in the process, why post or publish it, after all, when I'm done writing, I'm done."

The feedback is important. You improve your writing skills by honing them against the whetstone of your readers.

> "If I write something, expose myself, and nobody reads it, will I not look ridiculous?"

If nobody reads it, no one will think it's ridiculous.

> "There is so much noise out there, why would I think I'm not just adding to it? Let's all be quiet for a time."

If there's too much noise, the solution is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio by broadcasting more signal.

> "If I have a good insight, why put it out there and take the risk that someone will come and 'steal' it or adapt it and win big?"

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Value comes from how carefully and persistently you put an idea into practice.

> "Will I not be easily manipulable if I put my thoughts and preferences out there? Someone could take me for a ride by using this material to their advantage or fun"

The more you interact with others, the better you'll get at spotting people who just want to take you for a ride.

> "Ok, blogging/writing/publishing stuff can make you known and perhaps even popular. Now, shouldn't you optimize for 'what people want'? Or leave out unpopular things?" (but where is the fun in writing if you can't say what you just want to say anymore?)

Optimize for what turns your crank. Your readership will figure itself out.

Hey, I like some of these comebacks ;)

> If nobody reads it, no one will think it's ridiculous.

Ok, you got me here. Still, if you have a blog and there's tens and tens of entries and nary a comment to be seen, doesn't that look sad somehow?

I think part of it is to remove ego from the equation. The likelihood that anyone will be followed by name/blog alone is minuscule.

However, if you treat writing as a personal exercise, and understand that "marketing" (for want of a better word) a post of yours you particularly like, it's definitely useful. Submit high signal posts to here/Reddit/Digg/communities you are part of and you think will enjoy it.

I've had two blog posts hit the HN front page; both garnered about 4000 views. One of them also hit Reddit's /r/programming, pushing the view count to 20000. However, the Reddit commentary was essentially useless, whereas the HN commentary was awesome. In fact, the Reddit commentary was quite scathing, and that bruised my pride for a good couple of days afterwards. Sometimes obscurity is better.

However, I don't regret writing. The writing is the most important bit. The reading... less so.

Someone somewhere is going to read it if it's posted. I think it's worth the maybe slim chance that someone will get something useful out of it.

When I make a blog post, it gets about 80 hits during that week, then drops to about 10 hits a day. Over the theoretically endless life of the blog, that's a lot of chances to make a difference for someone.

if you have a blog and there's tens and tens of entries and nary a comment to be seen, doesn't that look sad somehow?

Some people blog on locked-down (private) blogs. You don't have to make it public.

This is why I turn off comments. On publicly trafficked blogs threads are often an idiotic menace--among people who know me, Facebook suffices.

Regarding your point that if it's all in the process why publish? consider that publishing makes the writing happen.

You might already be familiar with Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com). If not, it's a videogame themed webcomic that's been around for about 12 years now. They're successful - in fact, they have defined what "success" means for a webcomic.

They recently put out a anniversary book to celebrate how long they've been around. In an interview, the two guys responsible for the comic are asked how they've kept up with a Monday, Wednesday, Friday comic schedule for over a decade. How does that deadline impact their work?

Both the writer and the artists are clear on the idea that the deadlines are necessary. The writer compares the deadlines to a beast that must be fed. He goes on to state that the deadlines make the comic. Without the deadlines, there would be no comic.

Similarly, I was talking to a physics friend a bit ago, and mentioned I was working towards a conference submission deadline. Her field doesn't have hard deadlines for papers, and she envied having a date at which you had to just say "It's done."

It works better if there's someone to hold you to that deadline. I've set deadlines on personal projects before, but with no one to call me on it or check, it just goes by without me meeting it.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a specific person, either -- just a public commitment. If you say "look for a new post on my blog every Monday," you'll feel pressure to deliver.

There have been many, many times where I was struggling with some technical issue and I found a solution to the same (or similar) problem on someone's blog.

Even if you don't get a lot of traffic or comments, you may be able to help someone in the future.

That alone is a good reason to do it.

Actually, I found more and better solutions in blogs than in official documentation and books. Especially the topic of edge cases or documentation that doesn't work as advertised or error messages that don't mean what they think they mean.

No official install guide will say "But if you are running this on Ubuntu 8.0.4, it will throw off a spurious error message about wrong xpong version. you can ignore it and everything will be fine or you can fix this by running the install with --xpong-compatible", but bloggers say things like that all the time.

I try to blog every time I run into misleading documentation and every time I run into an error and there are no useful results when googling for that error message. The error messages and install guides are probably the biggest traffic generators for my blog.

"There is so much noise out there, why would I think I'm not just adding to it? Let's all be quiet for a time."

Most of the noise is generated by people who never ask themselves this question.