
Why host and write a blog? - aangjie
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/08/18/Blogodammerung
======
lordlarm
A trend I've been seeing on HN recently is a sixth reason:

    
    
      6. Promotion
    

This is especially from technology firms which wants to get their brand out to
their target group and also show off their knowledge in hip new technologies.

It's easy to spot them, since they often have a "Oh, and i forgot to tell you:
'We're hiring!'" at the end of the articles.

~~~
gvb
IMHO, promotion would fall under #3 "Influence".

------
mmariani
I don't have a blog, but I write a lot. That's why I could relate to many
points raised by this author. However, something was missing.

In my opinion, if you don't write to better understand how you think, you're
dead wood. No one can better relate with your brain than yourself, and writing
helps that relation grow.

Also, that helps improve your coding skills too. As you better understand how
your thinking process works, so your understanding of how to solve coding
related problems.

Anyway, in the end there's always someone interested in learning from other's
experiences, as long they are a bit enlightening or entertaining.

Anyway, I should start blogging just to write more. :)

~~~
aangjie
>In my opinion, if you don't write to better understand how you think, you're
dead wood.

Can't agree more. that's pretty much what got me into writing back in my
teens. But i have found that without reading,thinking and making connections,
it's kinda monotonous and you stop writing. Recently found 750words.com and
enjoy the interface(mine's black bg with white text). Infact, last 3 months i
have written 50K+ words on that site _. I hear mac guys can use ommwriter, but
linux user here.

_ __ my only current gripe being having to store it on someone's server. think
i'll build a open-source package.

------
wulczer
I like Matt Hempey's take on the problem:

    
    
      blog blog blog it all, blog it if it's big or small
      blog at the cineplex, blog while you're having sex
      blog in the locker room, babies blogging in the womb
      blog even if you're wrong, won't you blog about this song?

------
dfriedmn
"I’m convinced that medium/long-form writing’s future is unthreatened; but
remain puzzled that nobody in new media has really figured out the elite-
curation story and created a place that you go, and then subscribe to with
real money, because that’s where you have a high chance of being entertained,
influenced, and informed."

It seems like Svbtle may be going after exactly what you describe here,
although it's unclear whether it will be free or paid at this point.

~~~
natep
It seemed strange to me that the author would conclude that this is what they
expect to happen. If the goal is influence, wouldn't you want the share-
ability of free? Then again, if you convince enough influential people to
subscribe to your thoughts, and they can share amongst themselves, maybe that
nets you even more influence.

------
jseliger
I like this post, but I think he leaves out one potential issue: conversation.
We learn a lot through conversing with others, and while I don't think
blogging will take the place of chat any more than books or newspapers did, I
think it does supplement nicely; I wrote some more about this here:
[https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/signaling-
status-b...](https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/signaling-status-
blogging-academia-and-ideas/) , since I a) write a blog and b) am by now a
veteran of the "How and why to blog" blog posts, which have practically become
their own genre.

Most of all, however, I don't think most people blog to inform others: they
blog to inform _themselves_ , since writing is such an effective means of
stimulating thinking.

------
rbanffy
I'm not sure why I started.

I like writing, but when someone says he or she reads my blog, I'm a bit
freaked out. I mean... I did a couple interesting stuff, wrote a couple
articles here and there, but... It always feels weird. Other forms of online
discussions took away a lot of the energy and effort I used to put into my
blog and, gradually, I mostly stopped.

Oddly enough, today I pulled down a copy of it. I'll start moving it to Plone
4. Since it runs on an ancient version, 2.5 tops, my hosting provider would be
very happy if I migrated it to something less... anachronistic.

I will migrate it, of course. And possibly continue posting articles on it.
But I don't see myself investing as much time and energy on it as I did 10
years ago.

------
gambler
Interesting to see the original question. "Where is the New Yorker of the
internet?" I don't see any reasonable online outlets (in English) to publish,
say, one long article every two month. You cannot build a self-contained blog
around that format, and there is no infrastructure to do it otherwise.

There has been a a period of time where all the Web 2.0 hipsters relentlessly
bashed anything with editorial control as outdated, bad, unnecessary and so
on. (Which is kind of ironic, considering the whole movement was started by a
publisher.) That's part of the reason why, I think.

------
Gustomaximus
Another reason us to create a diary of sorts. At least for me I wish I had a
record of things learnt I could read over some years later and if some other
people can also read and discuss all the better..

------
jdrenterprises
In my opinion, writing and hosting a blog serves several purposes. One, to
hone my writing chops. Two, to express my own ideas in my own way... because
it's my own "house" online. Three, I've actually landed some fairly lucrative
client opportunities because of my blog. Four, it gives me a "home base"
content repository from which to draw other ideas, participate in other
discussions etc...

There are others, but these are the main ones.

------
joering2
Anyone having good tips/experience on getting your blog popular? From day one
you start writing and without proper "advertise" you can keep writing for
couple months before anyone swings along your page. I would love to start
blog, but thinking Im shouting out loud in a vacuum for months really
discourages me from even starting...

~~~
simonw
I actually think this is much easier today than it used to be. Write something
good, then tweet about it / Facebook it / share it on LinkedIn / post it to
Hacker News. You don't need a big audience of pre-existing subscribers to get
something good in front of a lot of people any more.

------
dinkumthinkum
But I thought all these "tech gods" were telling us books were garbage and
just dead tree propaganda and that blogs were the only way we should learn
anything. Now we shouldn't have blogs, we should just try to piece together
knowledge from a few tweets and a couple YouTube videos? You guys are getting
ridiculous!

------
mjn
I agree that "medium/long-form writing's future is unthreatened", but I'm less
sure that blogs are the answer long-term. They're one particular way of
publishing, which has pros and cons. Blogs' strengths are: a relatively low
barrier to entry, a convenient way for regular readers to follow updates, and
not much overhead in thinking about how to maintain a "website" in the
traditional sense. Everything is just a new blog post, and at most you slap a
few tags on them. Blogs' weaknesses are a strong focus on recency and lack of
content organization. Everything is about the recent blog posts. Archives are
often hard to use, and many blogs freely mix long-lasting things like essays,
with short-form daily-life types of things or comments on current events with
a short shelf-life.

An alternative is to separate out several kinds of writing. Paul Graham has an
'essays' page, for example, which is sort of like a blog, but less focused on
timeliness and updates. Only essays get posted there, and the focus is not
primarily on which essay is most recent (old essays don't quickly scroll off
the main page into the archive, for example).

In my own writing, I've come to the conclusion that if I had a blog, it would
contain two main kinds of entries: 1) essays I've written, and 2) references
to interesting things I've seen written elsewhere. At least for my personal
interests, I would prefer those to be separate, and also would prefer them to
take more of the flavor of "building a website" rather than "updating a blog".
That is, the focus is on the accumulated content, which you can read in any
order, not necessarily the order I happened to add it. This is partly because
I suspect most people who will run across it aren't ardent mjn fans waiting
for my latest update.

So what I've done is have two sections:

1\. Essays, which are organized primarily by subject rather than date, but do
also have an RSS feed and show recent additions at the top, for my
friends/acquaintances/colleagues who might read regularly:
<http://www.kmjn.org/notes/>

2\. Snippets/clippings, where I collect interesting excerpts I've run across.
If I had a blog, these would get interspersed with the long-form posts, but I
prefer having them separate in a sort of digital scrapbook, for the moment
fairly unorganized: <http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/>

I'm not saying that method is the best organizational method either, but so
far I like it more than a blog. I suppose part of it is that my thinking on
online writing is still heavily influenced by some of the 80s/90s hypertext
ideas, and "maintaining a website" versus "blogging". Websites often had an
/updates.html page where you could see what was recently added, but that
wasn't the _main_ interface. The main interface had some kind of rational
organization, rather than assuming reverse chronological order of addition is
the universal organizational framework.

~~~
aangjie
I noticed a similar usage in my case too. that's two different type of
writings. 1. Medium sized thoughts/posts(not really essays, just a few
connections i made while reading.around 500 words or so.) and 2. Pithy 1 or 2
sentence comment along with a link. The latter cases tend to be posted usually
from my phone.

On blog, not being a good place for long-form writing. I have begun to realize
that, i should write the long-forms without thinking about the publishing
medium to pay attention to the meaningful long-form _. Infact hate a MS Word
s/w for the same reason. and even writing on my 750words page is mostly just a
brain dump not coherent. Think vim might be best chance at focused long-form
writing.

_ \-- Disclaimer: not an expert in long form essay writings.

