I started blogging about five years ago, more or less in the manner you describe. Wrote an excited post or two or three right away, then maybe another in a week or two, and then... slowly stopped. Then a year later picked it up again, and then stopped.
I tried a variety of blog tools. I first had a blog at MIT, then when they killed that service, I tried several of the hip new services like Tumblr, Typepad, and Posterous. I stuck with Posterous the longest, but most recently moved to Wordpress running on my own virtual server. Along the way, I've kept some of my favorite posts from abandoned services, and deleted others that I no longer felt were worth sharing.
But why not write consistently? In my case, I suppose I feel like I frequently have nothing original to add to a topic. There are lots of things I could write about, but why should I, when somebody else already has?
Does it make sense, though, that a blog ought to be held to the standards of original research and contributions to a topic? It's a blog, not a doctoral thesis. So maybe that doesn't make any sense. What, then, should be the purpose of writing, if not to create brand new thoughts?
Expressing who you are and what you know may be reason enough. I would rather hire a consultant that had displayed their knowledge of their field through writing than somebody who just posted a list of skills they had, and I'm more likely to find somebody who can do a particular task if they have written about it than if they had just done the task and posted it on GitHub.
Blogging can be useful to market yourself as a consultant, to market your products you are trying to sell, to make new acquaintances on the web, to build stronger relations with people you already know, to help you improve as a writer and as a thinker... there are all sorts of benefits to blogging besides making original contributions to exposition of a topic. And even though I realize this, I still get stuck a lot on the non-originality thing.
I imagine that a lot of people do.
And then, there are people who just try blogging, realize they don't like it or have other things they'd rather do, and never delete the first post. That's a lot easier to explain, and probably accounts for way more abandoned blogs. :-)
> there are all sorts of benefits to blogging besides making original contributions to exposition of a topic. And even though I realize this, I still get stuck a lot on the non-originality thing.
Part of the problem is that many people see blogging as a teaching tool alone. More often than not, it's a conversation starter too, and the blogger ends up learning a great deal of new information in the process.
And even if you wish to be only a teacher with your blog, there is also a bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at play here. You think, what's the point of me explaining X? Everyone knows about X, probably better than me. Others wrote about X.
In truth, you'll find that more often than not plenty of people don't know about X. The way you'd describe and explain X may actually lead people to acquire a new prospective on the subject.
A very good point. I share a lot of puzzles and tech-notes on my blog. It might appear as a teaching tool to some but for me it is a great learning tool. An idea, a problem or a solution to a problem might exist in our mind in a confused form. But once we have to put it down in words for a larger audience, one has to re-think of the whole idea, problem or solution in a manner that can be expressed to a larger audience. This usually involves re-learning the idea in a simpler way.
In other words, I end up learning a lot in order to maintain a blog. The D-K effect won't bother one if one accepts the fact that a good blog helps you learn as much as it helps your readers learn. It's more about learning together rather than one person trying to teach other.
Really like the insight you made about conversation starting. The problem is that most people won't believe they can actually attract the audience needed to create a fertile conversation on their blog.
Philosophically speaking, doesn't this boil down to having something meaningful to discuss? Otherwise you're just generating web noise but we're all guilty of that.
I tried a variety of blog tools. I first had a blog at MIT, then when they killed that service, I tried several of the hip new services like Tumblr, Typepad, and Posterous. I stuck with Posterous the longest, but most recently moved to Wordpress running on my own virtual server. Along the way, I've kept some of my favorite posts from abandoned services, and deleted others that I no longer felt were worth sharing.
But why not write consistently? In my case, I suppose I feel like I frequently have nothing original to add to a topic. There are lots of things I could write about, but why should I, when somebody else already has?
Does it make sense, though, that a blog ought to be held to the standards of original research and contributions to a topic? It's a blog, not a doctoral thesis. So maybe that doesn't make any sense. What, then, should be the purpose of writing, if not to create brand new thoughts?
Expressing who you are and what you know may be reason enough. I would rather hire a consultant that had displayed their knowledge of their field through writing than somebody who just posted a list of skills they had, and I'm more likely to find somebody who can do a particular task if they have written about it than if they had just done the task and posted it on GitHub.
Blogging can be useful to market yourself as a consultant, to market your products you are trying to sell, to make new acquaintances on the web, to build stronger relations with people you already know, to help you improve as a writer and as a thinker... there are all sorts of benefits to blogging besides making original contributions to exposition of a topic. And even though I realize this, I still get stuck a lot on the non-originality thing.
I imagine that a lot of people do.
And then, there are people who just try blogging, realize they don't like it or have other things they'd rather do, and never delete the first post. That's a lot easier to explain, and probably accounts for way more abandoned blogs. :-)