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I've commented before that I don't use Facebook. Why should I? I have a blog. Anything I want to share with the world will be written here. I've had this blog for nearly ten years. I'm not hard to find, so anyone who might use Facebook to find me could just as easily search for me to find this blog.

And yet, there's something about Facebook that keeps drawing people in. Is it the ease of integration, such that you can go to a single site to see all the goings-on with your Facebook friends? Does Facebook make it demonstrably easier to participate in conversations, versus reading and writing blogs? Or is it just the economic factors: Facebook is free, and requires no investment of time to maintain or support? Or is it simply that Facebook has a critical mass already, and it's easier to use the tool all your friends are already using, rather than to get them to migrate over to your blog?

It's not just Facebook, either. I've seen a number of posts lately from long-time bloggers apologizing for abandoning their blogs in favor of Twitter, identi.ca, or other micro-blogging services. Micro-blogging services allow a much more rapid, conversational style of communication, and it's easy to see why people become so enamored with it. I use Twitter, and generally enjoy it, but I use it for things that are too fleeting, or too trivial, for a full blog post. I consider everything on Twitter to be ephemera, whereas I consider my blog posts to be long-lived pieces of my consciousness: something I may want to refer back to, or remember in the future.

As you may know, I'm involved with the blogging platform Habari. I like using Habari to write my blog posts. I like working on Habari, and investigating ways to make blogging easier for people. I'd like to continue to work on Habari, and make it the best blogging platform it can be.

To that end, I'd like to collect some feedback about why you blog. Have you stopped blogging in favor of Facebook or Twitter? If so, why? Is there something specifically lacking from a blog that drives you to use other social media solutions? If you still maintain a blog, what do you use it for? Do you use different tools for different messages, or just to reach different audiences?

I've been writing letters lately. I started, in part, because I was trying to "play" a game of De Profundis. That didn't last for very long, though I prefer to think that I'm taking an extended breather, rather than throwing in the towel completely on that effort. It's a neat idea for a game, and really challenges me to exercise my creativity in ways I don't normally, so I'd like to return to the "game" at some point. The other reason I'm writing letters is because I want my recipients to have something tangible from me. Even if they don't appreciate it now, I want them to some day be able to look back and appreciate the effort of putting pen to paper, and stamps to envelopes, and to have something physical by which to remember me. I worry, though, that I might be making it too hard for the recipients of my correspondence to read my thoughts, due to my atrocious penmanship.

I wrote all through middle school and high school, for both class assignments and personal pleasure. I only rarely typed things on the family computer. Even when I got my own computer and printer in my room, I only typed the longest of assignments. I actually quite like writing. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at it. My penmanship is abominable, and has always been so. I don't specifically recall any guidance in the art of penmanship as a youth, so either my teachers were just happy that I could coarsely produce the correct characters, or there was no formal requirement for neat writing.

I've always admired people with neat writing. Most of my friends write in a tight, well-formed manner that is easily legible and does not consume inordinate amounts of space on the page. I've taken recently to looking at the penmanship of complete strangers, too, and it seems that the norm is for easy-to-read handwriting. Only a small fraction of the people I've observed have handwriting as bad -- or worse -- than my own.

Part of it, no doubt, is laziness. I'm lazy with the pen. I don't want to spend the time forming perfect characters. My brain is much, much faster than my hand, and as I usually write extemporaneously, I want to get my thoughts on paper as quickly as possible. My rush to record my thoughts exacerbates the issue of my lazy handwriting, resulting in outright sloppy handwriting. I could easily pass my writing off as that of a doctor writing a prescription.

An aside: it was recently suggested to me that doctors intentionally write poorly so that they can claim plausible deniability in the event of malpractice suits. "That's not what I prescribed!" might be a valid defense if the handwriting is not particularly legible. Whether this is true or not, it doesn't help me. There's little benefit to plausible deniability in most of my correspondence.

I haven't received any specific complaints from the recipients of my letters yet, but it's something that's been bothering me personally for a little while. I've recently begun looking at tips on improving handwriting, though I haven't enacted any of the specific suggestions yet.

I should probably go back to typing my correspondence, so that the recipients can actually read it!