Why I blog
gabrielweinberg.com
gabrielweinberg.com
If you can stand the snarky answers that a crowd will always generate, there is nothing in the world like writing a blog which basically says "I don't understand this! Please help" and having folks come by and offer assistance.
Blogging is crowdsourcing introspection.
I like that line. Often, the act of writing something forces me to commit to a particular thought rather than the Heisenberg-uncertainty haze that is usually bouncing around in my brain, and it is often the case that once the thought has been nailed down it looks a lot less compelling than it did when it was still a probability function.
This is the main reason I write things down. Writing something down forces me to commit and defend a certain idea, even if only to myself. Writing it down for the world to see forces me to defend the idea to additional level of scrutiny. In short, writing something down helps me keep from BSing myself.
Totally agree. After my first blog post I woke up the next morning with the same feeling I get after a night of too much drinking, asking myself "what did I do?".
I agree with most of the article's points, except when it comes to commenting. My thinking is that commenting systems often degrade into back-and-forth, one-on-one bickering and end up distracting from the main points being raised in the blog post.
The exception of course, would be technical blog posts, where comment threads often include more in depth tips, corrections, and tidbits of related information.