Good question.
In the day and age of Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, blogs are rapidly becoming a relic of the past. Reminders of an era of the internet without centralization, without norms, where outsiders gathered and explored the unknown virtual world.
In today’s world, blogs don’t have a strong following. They certainly aren’t in the zeitgeist. But they have a purpose. At least to some.
Why one should blog is an often discussed topic on the forums I visit. I tend to agree with the general sentiment of those comment sections: that blogging is good. It’s good for yourself and can some times (few and far between) lead to good extrinsic outcomes. What people don’t say is blogging for profit or for people aside from yourself is a good idea. And I would tend to agree.
Blogging for yourself has a variety of benefits (that I, conceptually, agree with):
- Creating reference materials for future you
- Improves your writing—which I have found to be invaluable in my professional career and personal life, even though I’m an “engineer”
- Forces you to think, reason, and articulate your thoughts. You can’t write a blog post about AI, a book, or a movie without synthesizing and understanding your own thoughts.
One of the core reasons I want to blog, and blog regularly, is stated very eloquently by Paul Graham in his essay—ironically titled—the The Need to Read.
A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.
For me, the answer to “why blog?” is that I want to be forced to think, to summarize my opinions, to articulate my thoughts, and I want to explore.
Today I reboot my blog. I plan to write frequently, to improve, to learn, to think. I hold the right to go back and edit my posts as writing is a process of learning.
