Do you have a blog? And if so, why?

The main reason I blog is so other people can avoid having to go through some of the struggles that I went through. Examples: posting a useful code snippet; I will soon post a guide about how I fixed my insomnia. I soon hope to get the courage to tackle deeper, more personal issues about depression, friendship, identity, purpose, family, conflict, relationships. Although insomnia is serious and personal, which is why I'm holding off on posting it... for now. It will be written and published soon. I declare it.

Sometimes I wonder :)

For me it's about community. Physicists, Biologists, Medical Doctors all have professional journals. But for programmers and tech entrepreneurs there are the blogs. I think we all have to realize that blogs, and places like HN, are the conscience of the tech movement and I personally feel there's a duty in saying something if it's not being said elsewhere.

Look for example at Anthropomorphic Global Warming. Whether you believe in it or not you have to admit some of the stuff that's come out recently should never have been allowed to happen. Stuff like alternative opinions (see Richard Lindzen of MIT for example) being kept out of the science journals. The reason that sort of thing happens in a community is because rational scientists don't stand up to their community and say "This is wrong. I don't agree with this guy but we should hear him out". The fact that many in the climatology community didn't do that has set back our understanding of the phenomenon by years if not decades

To me blogging is a way to stand up to my community when I feel mistakes are being made or the community is going down the wrong path. That's why I do it.

Yes -- two of them, one of which I chiefly write and one of which I contribute to. The former is about books (which I like reading) and writing (which I like doing), and it's at http://jseliger.com . Now I'm one of the perhaps ill-advised souls in English grad school, so some of the material on it might eventually make it into papers. Occasionally I find other interesting book people too, which is an added bonus.

The other blog, Grant Writing Confidential (http://blog.seliger.com), is about my family's business, and it serves a couple of purposes: 1) it signals to clients that we actually know what we're talking about, 2) it brings in search engine traffic we'd other wise not get, and c) we get a chance to write about our work, which virtually no one else understands.

So in both cases, I write for a mixture of business and pleasure.

Blogging has done one thing well to me and that's the reason I blog regularly. It helped shape my thinking well. Often when you have an idea it can be vague - formless. Writing it down gives it a good shape and setting it in stone. It's also not a magazine where every fucking thing is edited, you have the will to write whatever you want, however you want.

To summarise, discover your communicative personality and help set your ideas in stone.

> 4) What a blogger writes just doesn't matter.

If that was true, you wouldn't have quoted Jeff Atwood.