Why do you blog?

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?