| Blog Entry - Wednesday, February 11th, 2004 | Add / Read (9) |
Do you write your blog for yourself or for your readers? Or a combination? How much work do you put into your posts, and is that related to who you envision as your audience?
Jess made a comment not too long ago about why you should post your solutions when you've asked a question -- so you can find them again later! This relates to blogging because often it sounds like those who are posting really technical stuff (especially them, at any rate, although not *only* them) are using their blogs as a kind of notebook -- saving snippets of code or solutions to issues via their blog, rather than saving them in some private Notes db that only they can see.
Then, Joi Ito wrote a blog a few days ago talking about a previous post he'd made (and a comment on that post) that was a "superficial" treatment of a topic, rather than a more 'in-depth with sources' kind of post -- but justified writing the post, rather than writing something in a journal to post later, with the idea that his blog is his notebook. And the idea, of course, that if you don't write it down and talk about it while it's fresh, you may never get around to it (of course, this may be the blogosphere version of Darwinism -- if it was important and interesting enough, you *would* come back to it, but, then again, maybe not, considering how overloaded and busy we all are... anyway, I digress).
My point, though, is that those of us who write blogs all write for different reasons and for different audiences. And the discussion of whether it's ok to treat a difficult topic with a shallow vs. rigorous post is an interesting one. I think that sometimes I don't post when I don't have time to really think out what I want to say, and create all the links, and etc, because I don't want to appear not to have journalistic (or blogolistic) integrity -- especially considering my profession -- however, this means that many times I don't post something I'm thinking about, either because I forget or lose interest or get too busy or someone else posts something about it first and it's no longer appropriate for me to post. And then I get frustrated at not having blogged, so I end up blogging something "light" or superficial *anyway* because I'm hoping to get a quick blog up while I have time.
In any case, the discussion on shallow vs. rigorous, Rational Ignorance, and their attendant ideas, both at Joi's blog and at Lago's, was interesting to me. Of course, this post itself is an example of what frustrates Lago, I suspect, being at most a question and certainly not a well-thought out, researched, organized treatment of the topic, but, like many, I'm posting a note about it here so that perhaps I will go back and think on it more deeply later.
Author: Libby
Posted at: 07:00:00 AM
