To Blog Or Not To Blog…
July 14, 2005
Before becoming interested or engaged in blogging, it was hard for me to find the point. I had lots of unanswered questions. Why do it? How is blogging different than a regular website? How will blogging benefit me or others? Truthfully, my understanding has only come after hours of discussing this concept with Casey long into many evenings and many beers.
My first real interest in blogging came after I needed to teach blogs to my “Essentials of Web Development” class. At the time I setup a few blogs and was pretty much underwhelmed. I first became truly interested in having my own after Cliff introduced me to Gallery. This was a real selling point for me, a clean way to organize my images online. However, my frequency of using this was limited and my blogging interest waned.
Then about a month and a half ago I redesigned my blog, changed to WordPress, started using ecto, all part of a conscious decision to understand why I should blog. At this point I should also mention how I had already realized the value of other people’s blogs.(MaisonBisson, LDN, etc.)
So back to the questions at hand… Now I think I know why I blog and in turn this may help others to understand the appeal. First off, I have interests, reading, seeing, movies, technology, etc. My reviews an opinions on these things are in my head, if I write them down I can stop thinking about them and mentally reanalyzing. I have ideas about things, technology, the world, how things can and should be done. Some of these ideas may be useful or insightful, some not, but once again I can blog them and move on. Finally, I occasionally find entertaining content on the web, or become involved in creating my own (see Watto and RotoCell). I don’t want to forget about these things, and if I put them on my site others may find them entertaining as well.
The last part is the most simple to understand. Most people have bookmarks. This is a simple concept, but not all that useful for sharing with others, or accessing at varying locations. By blogging sites or things you like, it is easier to find them again. As far as I’m concerned if your blog is only an annotated bookmark list, that is plenty of justification. Your bookmarks and notes on why they are significant adds a richness to the internet than is never accomplished by merely emailing or bookmarking your favorite sites.
The other two are slightly slipperier to grasp. Casey puts this best when he refers to it as “the Google economy.” Basically if you are not contributing your thoughts and links out to the web community, then search engines like google have a much more difficult time determining what sites and topics are of interest to the general public.
Additionally, I think this is a bit like the infinite monkey theorem. If we make millions of micro-steps in our thinking and innovation, we can move technology and concepts forward great leaps in extraordinarily short periods of time.
Most of us have experienced this when we search google for answers to questions we have, or solutions to problems we’re experiencing. Usually an answer is just a simple search away, but in the instances where it is not and you plow through the problem regardless, it is your responsibility to contribute that small innovation or insight back to the web community so the next person can focus on another problem. Slowly this moves everyone forward without one person having to carry us all or do all the research.
If you’re still wondering how this is different than a regular website, my response is that it isn’t. Except the focus is on content and regular updating. The more you post the better chance you have of helping someone with something.
Others on this topic:
Electric Forest: Wikipedia and Libraries
MaisonBisson: Is Blogging Career Suicide?
Wikipedia: Weblog
Tags: blog, blogging, ecto, infinite monkey theorem, puppy, technology
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[...] The next major point he makes is “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” which I compare to the infinite monkey theorem and is my reason why people should blog. He cites the success of Wikipedia, Flikr, open source web development, and more. [...]
emm.. nice post man..