Why I Write This Blog

I've been blogging since 2001.  My purpose has not been to record my thoughts or to promote my career, but to save me time. 

Jon Udell said it well; to paraphrase:  As I read the web, including "my daily RSS inflow in Bloglines, it's very much in my own interest to put the few items of most value in a place where I can find them later. That I'm also putting them someplace where you can find them, that you may be doing the same thing for me, that we may collectively move toward standardized use of shared topics as we iterate this process, that reputation-based filtering may then begin to operate on the emergent set of topics -- all this is goodness, and may ultimately matter, but my participation (and yours) does not depend on these outcomes. Pure self-interest is a sufficient driver. "

Jon's authoring tool is like mine, a "bookmarklet, so that selected text on the target page is used [as an] extended description of the item. This makes the items I route easier for me to scan. And for you too."  The searchability of the extended description helps in two ways. 

• I can search my blog to find collections of links for friends or colleagues.  Cut and paste into an email, done in a sec. I do this at least twice a week (especially after lunches where I say "I'll send you the link...")
• I can find the information again if it moves.  Sometimes the original source for the information moves it to another location as part of a website reorganization.  Or a newspaper will move a story to a paid archive.  Or, the original source gets merged or bought out and disappears.  In these cases, I can usually ask Google to find a page with an exact phrase match to some of the text I recorded, and I can find another copy.  (Or, worst case, I can ask the Wayback Machine.)

The (few) people that use news aggregators can of course read what I blog as I record it.  And those (even fewer) who use Bloglet for email delivery get it the night after I write it.  And that's for free to me; I'm just keeping my own information in a way that bookmarks and private documents can't match.

I think that with time, this is a reason that blogging can become universal -- an individual payoff, regardless of what others do.