In fact, let's be honest: a blog is just a buzzword. "Homepages" have been around forever, why rename them into something which isn't even a real English word. Before '03 corporate websites had a page called "News", now they call it a "blog" and make it look a little bit more personal.

After about 3 years of this "citizen journalism" I went back to slashdot, they provide more than enough of daily time wasting material. Real news are in books, never mind that they happened in the past, at least they're true and delivered to you professionally.

And finally, I don't trust "blogs". Even my modest page with 40 daily accidental readers attracts an email from a PR firm every once in a while, asking me to promote some BS they're getting paid for. I can only imagine how it's like for someone with 10K+ monthly uniques.. Most of these "bloggers" are cheap part-time journalists armed with inflated egos but lacking skills/time to check their facts and, sometimes, their spelling.

I use my blog to 'try' and polish my ideas.

Funny things happen when you write them down. The ideas that sound great in your head suddenly appear trivial, less substantial. That's why working on them in blog format is a good idea. You get to throw ideas around for others to read, comment. Shred. Some work, others get shot down or in the process you find better ones. The ones that work can attract comment. This is where you can make improvements or just kill them.

Ideas can be polished far easier under the wear of others scrutiny.

I disagree. Fewer people care about what you did last weekend than if you wrote a cool new library for Ruby. Blogs help connect people with shared interests and what's wrong with writing about your interest in programming? I think your definition of what a blog should be is pretty narrow and it excludes a big part of the blogsphere that people care about.

Why are you restricting blog's definition to only personal diary. Things evolve. Whoever said initially that it's a personal diary didn't know that it can evolve to any extent.

What's wrong in writing your learnings or insights on any professional or niche topic? What's wrong if I spent lots of time in learning some Java hack and sharing it with community so that they don't have to invest same amount of time that I have invested?

I think your view-point is extreme. There are always handful bloggers who write great analysis of particular topic genuinely. It's totally in reader's control to decide what to read and what to pass.

On the other hand, if you have some perspective to contribute about Rails development, the value proposition to the reader is much clearer.

Daniel

Maybe writing a blog bears some small resemblance to doing a startup. It takes more time than is reasonable, in the average case nobody else really notices, and once in a while it will propel a (partially-random) someone to fame and fortune. In other words, it's only really worth it for the sense of personal satisfaction it will give you.

Maybe it's my sense of self-preservation, preventing me from maintaining too many irrational behaviours simultaneously?

True. For me at least I spent somewhere between 5-8 hours on each 500-800 word post. This seems to be pretty standard among top bloggers from what I've read. Most people decide to hit the back button in less than five seconds, so your first couple paragraphs especially have to be almost unreasonably well written and polished.

>in the average case nobody else really notices

If your blog is good then people notice surprisingly fast. You'd think that guys like Scoble wouldn't start reading your blog until you had 10,000 RSS subscribers. But in reality it's the guys like Scoble who spend eight hours a day reading blogs who are the first to find and link to your blog. There are some strange forces at play that I haven't quite figured out, but for whatever reason your first 250 RSS subscribers are pretty much guaranteed to be (on average) more intelligent and successful than you.

>once in a while it will propel a (partially-random) someone to fame and fortune.

While it's pretty difficult to get people to recognize your name, it's also really easy to get people to recognize one of your ideas. Getting on the front page of Hacker News isn't that hard if you are writing good stuff. Whether you make the front page of Reddit and Digg is mostly random these days, but if you consistently write good stuff then it will happen a bunch of times, you just can't really predict when.

I'm definitely going to start updating my blog again eventually. But I'd much rather post nothing than post stuff that isn't insightful. For some reason bloggers who write frequently gain a disproportionate share of RSS subscribers. This is really unfortunate and in many ways represents a huge failing of RSS. But because your first few RSS subscribers are going to be the most important for your career, it seems worth it to stick with only posting insightful stuff even if you occasionally have nothing to say for weeks on end.

It sounds clichéd perhaps, but you should write because you enjoy writing, not because you want to achieve all the secondary stuff that comes after you've written stuff for a long time and finally accumulated all those bells and whistles.

Daniel

The reason being that there is almost nothing worse than having to, 6 months later, do exactly the same research over again because you can't quite remember how you figured it out last time :/

The publicly visible bit is just because, well, I am documenting it anyway so I might as well let google index it. I always find it slightly amusing when I'm searching for an answer and one of my own solutions comes up that I had totally forgotten about.

As a result readership is very low (about 10k users/20k pages per month) but I'm not really bothered as I'm not selling advertising or looking for revenue or fame :)

I used to be very optimistic ("global village", etc) about the Internet, newsgroups, blogs, but now it seems that most of the time, communication drives people into irreconcilable factions. Too many people bring limited reading comprehension skills with them, and end up violently agreeing with each other or creating conflict for absolutely no reason. Most discussions seem to descend all too quickly into name-calling ("fanboy", etc) and I personally fail to see the value in it.

The best blogs start with some simple questions: do I have anything of value to contribute? Am I an interesting person who has achieved something noteworthy? Do I have unique insights or am I just recycling the zeitgeist? For most bloggers, I suspect the answer to all those questions is "no", and (although they can keep going if they like) there's precious little reason to actually read them.

Blogs are not an appropriate medium for publishing every kind of information. What about people who write books, essays, reports or even user manuals? Are they just "consuming information"?

Yes. I've also discovered that blogging has to be done very frequently to obtain a significant audience. For example, Paul Kedrosky ( http://paul.kedrosky.com/ ) sometimes posts three times per day, seven days per week. I'd rather spend my time doing extended programming sessions. I'm also inclined to write 4000 word epics rather than 100 word stream-of-consciousness posts, so the medium isn't optimal for my style. Finally, I'm not keen on blogging's inherent chronological structure. However, the advent tagging has offset this issue.

http://www.stevepavlina.com http://www.randsinrepose.com

To name but two.

4000 words might be a bit hard to digest for a blog post, but there's a happy medium in 1000-2000 words which you don't need to publish every day (or even several times a week, as Rands has shown), so long as it's worth reading.

Daniel

Why don’t write a blog myself? If I have to I will write about my own projects; for now I’m too busy. I generally prefer forums if I want to give my opinion on specific subject.

For some people, written communication can be quite challenging, but that doesn't mean that they aren't producing information, it just might not inside your view of the world.

I hope that twitter like services will break this trend.

The discipline of having to write it all down does certainly sharpen ones thoughts, and comments often supply links to other material on the topic. In my case commenters also point out ghastly errors I've made, but thats probably just me.

One of my blog posts details the issues I had trying to get Console2 to work the way I wanted it to. I wrote my experiences with it, and can hope that someone out there is having the exact same issue that I had, and benefit from it.

Creating new content is hard, writing well is even harder. A blog gives you the ability to work on both simultaneously. But on the flip side, who says it has to be brand new content? Write what you think is useful, maybe only to you. Treat it as a journal of thoughts, a repository of solutions to problems that you came across, a bank of opinions on things that matter to you, a list of articles that reverberated with you, it does not matter. What does matter is you being the authentic you.

Those who think most blogs are bs, yes, most are. But seriously, are you telling me that you have never come across a blog that worked for you? If yes, why couldn't that have been your blog?

I agree with Daniel that one should write to make things clearer to others. Putting an idea/suggestion/article under public (???) scrutiny is like cleaning up your house when your parents are coming over. You are forced to clean up your act, maintain focus and continuity and ensure that everything is its place.

In conclusion, blog if you feel the need. Blog if you think you have something useful to say, or add to a discussion, or even "retweet" (or reblog, in this case). I have had several people begin following me on twitter, probably because I retweet a lot. I act as a news filter/trusted source for those who dont want to have to read everything @techcrunch puts up. And if you don't want that, unfollow, or unsubscribe. But it takes time, it takes effort on my part, and it may detract you from what you should have been doing.

Hopefully I answered some questions here.

Browsing news for 4 hours a day isn't really research, more likely to be procrastination.

Daniel

Yet there were things I wanted to talk about, including things I'd invented.

So I struck a compromise: I treat my blog like a newspaper about things, and not me. Which is good, since I'm more boring than even the most boring newspaper.

On a side not I am very active on twitter http://twitter.com/dodeja (micro-blogging seems to work for many non-bloggers)

the choice is almost a no brainer at this point in time.

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs

And you have company.

But I do post every once and a while.