I'm a little bit late to the "Why I Blog" party, but I'm going to tackle the question anyway.
There are a number of superficial reasons why I blog:
- I like to think.
- I like to write.
- I have a terrible memory.
- I need something to do at the laundromat.
- I greatly enjoy the sound of my own voice.
Just kidding. Sort of.
The real reason why I blog has to do with something a high school teacher of mine once told me: you haven't really learned something until you can teach it to somebody else. A corrolary to that is "you haven't really learned something until you've written it down in a form that someone else can understand." Blogging is, for me, a critical part of the learning process. It "closes the loop" on knowledge acquisition and helps to cement a concept in my mind.
I blog about things I'm learning about because I find that the act of writing a blog post helps to crystallize my understanding about complex topics. Writing forces me to formulate an opinion and articulate it in a cohereant manner. It forces me to think critically about an idea and helps me to ask questions that fill in the gaps of my understanding. Prior to posting something, my thoughts on that topic are usually scattered and disconnected. After writing them down, I find that my thinking has congealed into something precise and concrete -- as a result, my understanding of that topic increases through the act of writing.
I like blogging because it gives me a permanent record of my thought process. I can't carry around everything I'm thinking about in my head at one time -- by blogging, I can sort of page my brain out to disk for a while. When I need to come back to that information, it's there on the web waiting for me. Titling my blog "Brain.Save()" was somewhat of a joke at the time -- it's funny to me that it's really evolved into a long-term persistance mechanism for my current thinking.
Finally, I like writing a blog because I like reading blogs. There's a tangible sense of community in the blogging world that I enjoy actively participating in. I'm really excited that there's so many bloggers going to the PDC, because I'm really looking forward to physically meeting the people whom I've never met but feel like I spend quite a bit of time with.
Learn to blog. Blog to learn. That's why I do what I do.
