Great observations, I especially like Jerry's little anecdote. A professor I had once told me there are three reasons most people write:
I think we all do each of these at one point or another. Though I do quite a bit of writing as part of my job, the vast majority of my 'writing' (loosely defined) falls into that last category, sometimes as a way to figure out what I'm going to write to meet my job requirements, sometimes just trying to figure out what I think about something (which is kind of what my blogs are). I can't tell you how many pages of doodles in notebooks I've accumulated over the years, the abandoned drafts and mind maps cluttering my hard-drive (and laying around on floppies, zip disks, and CDs), and abandoned blogs and posts that are adding to 'net pollution (sorry). They may never see the light of day again, and I probably wouldn't understand them out of context if they did, but they definitely served their purpose.
]]>Is there a connection between blogging and communities? I gave a presentation on this topic recently, and this is what I had to say. [Read More]
I use my writing both to formalize what I've been thinking as well as to get those thoughts into the larger world and see how they come back to me. Nancy White does the same thing. [Read More]