Why blogging?
To start, what exactly is blogging?
According to Google, it is to “add new material to or regularly update a blog”. Great… but what really is a “blog”? Fortunately, Google provides the origin for the word as well. It comes from “weblog”, which comes from web in the sense ‘World Wide Web’ and log in the sense ‘regular record of incidents.’
So there we have blogging in it’s most basic form: writing regularly on the internet. You might realize we now have a conflation of two different questions in “why blogging?”:
- Why write at all?
- Why post it on the internet?
I think it’s important to realize that there can only be two possible answers, in essence.
- for others
- for yourself
(If you’re really rigorous, you might wonder whether that statement can be reduced to a single answer. You might say that humans are fundamentally selfish, and that “for others” is really just part of “for yourself”. It makes for an interesting debate, Quora, Time).
But these simple answers are not very enlightening on their own. That is, “writing for yourself” or “writing for others” are rather generic statements that could have many different practical meanings. As such, part of the goal of this article is to explore the different implications of these two goals of writing. It so happens that “for yourself” aligns closely with the question “why write?”, and “for others” with “why post on the internet?”.
Ultimately, I believe there is merit in each of the two reasons, and that people should aim for both!
Why write
There are some great benefits to writing often. Two that I value are:
- developing communication skills,
- exploring interests (and potentially helping you discover them)
Communicating
My middle school (a math/science focused school) gave out a monthly award for the best student piece of writing. Each time our principal came to the winner’s class to give the very same exhortation, saying: science and math will do you nothing if you cannot communicate!
Communication’s importance cannot be understated. It has been studied for thousands of years, from Aristotle, who argued for the value of Rhetoric and Persuasion 1, to Harvard Business Review, which regularly features research pertaining to the powerful effects of communication 2 3.
One practical, real-world application of this lofty idea of “communication” is marketing. Jeff Atwood writes how marketing is exceedingly useful for the engineer, that even the most amazing code isn’t relevant until:
- people understand what you’re doing
- people become interested in what you’re doing
- people get excited about what you’re doing
Exploration
Beyond improving your communication skills, writing also enables you to explore interests and to flesh out ideas.
A personal example: I didn’t know much about html, js, css until making this website, or about grammars until I tried to explain them.
The added benefit of such exploration is that personal projects grow. A single idea naturally flourishes into a tree of possibilities and potential improvements.
Why post on the internet
- Asked why he blogs, Jeff Atwood writes:
Mostly for selfish reasons. I needed a way to keep track of software development over time – whatever I am thinking about or working on. I research things I find interesting, then document my research with a public blog post, which I can easily find and refer to later. Hopefully other people will find these posts helpful, relevant, or interesting.
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There’s no better way to remember something than to try to explain it cogently.
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Your blog is like an old attic. Just as you may find a dusty forsaken Gameboy Advance 5 years from now, so too you’ll find your old blog posts.
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It’s cool to make interactive things for other people to enjoy. Below is an interactive force simulation (made using d3):
Onward!
A couple great blogs I’ve found (that happen to be tech-bent) are from Steve Yegge, Jeff Atwood, and Joel Spolsky.
I suggest you write and/or post things on the internet. Ideally both! There are places to easily get started like Medium, WordPress, 750 words, and many more one search away. Challenge yourself.