Why Blog? My Reasons.

I do not blog for fame or fortune. (There is none.)

I do not blog for you. (Although I do appreciate you taking the time to read my blog posts.)

I blog for me.

Not for narcissism, but for capturing knowledge.

Ken Adams points out in his post: Reflections on a Year of Blogging:

“To feed the blog beast, I’ve had to scour the online and paper worlds and the remote recesses of my brain, looking for issues that I hadn’t addressed previously or needed to revisit. I’ve then had to prepare analyses that would withstand scrutiny while being halfway engaging. It’s been rare for a day to go by without my doing some form of work related to the blog. …
In particular, I have a second edition of MSCD to produce. Without the blog, working on the second edition would have seemed a looming and monumental task. But now I have a year’s worth of great material to work with, and it addresses a far broader range of topics than I would have dreamed up without a hungry blog to feed.”

Matt mused in his post: Blogging: Why would I want to do that?! :

“If, like me, you’re a knowledge worker rather than a process worker, you use knowledge and information to get your work done. If you need to find information, clarify your thoughts and share them with others before you write that paper, maybe blogging is the way to help you get your proverbial ducks in a row. Maybe blogging will help you get comments from others, whether they’re peers, colleagues or people you don’t even know who are also doing the same sorta stuff as you.”

Matt coined the term “thought incubator” in one of his comments on one of my posts.

This blog is primarily a personal knowledge management tool for me: A space where I can keep information, wrap context around it, categorize it and search for it.

I blog as a way to capture information on the internet and wrap some context around it. I bookmark sites in my browser and bookmark sites with del.icio.us. [The bookmarks in my browser are for sites I visit regularly. The bookmarks in del.icio.us are for sites that I found interesting and may need to turn back to one day.] But bookmarks do not have much context. You can wrap some metadata around them by giving them tags or putting them into folders. But you really do not have much of an opportunity to say why they interested you.

I blog to write my thoughts down on knowledge management in a way that I can reuse them and adapt them.

I blog to highlight information for future knowledge management projects that I may want to start or to highlight future goals for existing projects.

The search feature of this blog allows me to quickly find the post I was looking for, even if I forgot the name of the post or when I published it.

The label feature allows we to review my thoughts, along the lines of Matt’s “thought incubator” concept and Ken Adams “material generation” concept.

Why blog? Why not blog!

Blogger and many of its competitors are free, easy to set up and learn. If you are shy, Blogger allows you to keep your blog private. (Sorry if that sounds like an ad for Blogger, but I did not know how easy it could be to setup and run a blog.)