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?
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February 10th, 2009 at 3:12pmI'm not much of a blogger tbh. Tried a few starts, always ended up deleting them again. I'm on and off on blogging on a regular basis. That said I tend to blog about things I'm currently doing or involved with. I tend to stay away from personal stuff most of the time since I feel that it's "None of your business"-stuff for the general anonymous blog visitor. Not that I have many anyway but i just dont feel too confident with putting private stuff up for grabs on the net, although you cant really quite escape it these days can't you? I'm on several social networks as well: Xing, LinkedIn for work stuff, Twitter for socializing and "chatter", and some special interest and/or locale groups/sites/etc. It's like you said: a blog has a slightly static feel to it. twitter is more chatty so i am one of those people that tend to use it as an almost IM. greetings fengor -
February 10th, 2009 at 3:14pmI blog when I have something of substance to say. I Twitter when I don't. Twitter is an amusing distraction, and occasionally give me links to interesting sites that then lead to more conversation. But blogs contain more thought-out content. At least the blogs that I read do. If they don't, I unsubscribe from them. I guess the big difference between a blog and these other sites is that my blog is my conversation, in which you may come participate if you wish, while Facebook is a shared conversation. I find Facebook increasingly irritating, for several reasons. It's hard to keep up with all the chatter, most of which I don't care about. I find that my main activity on Facebook is rejecting invitations to peculiar things that have nothing to do with actual relationships. Pokes, causes, water balloons, invitations to write 28 random things, or read the 28 random things from someone who snubbed me in highschool. So there's the other thing, about which you've written before. What defines a friend? I have a raft of "friends" who I vaguely remember from highschool or college, or who actively snubbed me in college, and now I feel somehow that I can't trim that list, for fear of offending. On twitter, at least, I can prune my follow list when it gets out of hand, because none of those people asked me to follow them. But on FB, it's folks who said "will you be my friend?", and so presumably that means something. And so FB gets more and more unmanageable as more people get involved in the inane chatter. I think I'll prune my "friend" list today. Um ... what was the question? Why do I blog? Because I have things I'd like to say, and occasionally folks like to listen. But mostly, it's entirely self-serving. It's a personal journal, and I have just enough hubris to think that the general public might occasionally care what I have to say. -
February 10th, 2009 at 3:39pmI'm in the age range that joined Facebook when it was still closed to everyone but students, and it was a slightly different environment then. It was much more an extension of one's immediate social scene. I still use Facebook to connect with people and organize events, but I don't really use it regularly for personal purposes anymore. I'm like you - my blog (and Twitter) is how I prefer to connect with people online. The reason I blog is a simple one - I write. I've been writing as a hobby since I was about nine, I've kept a personal journal for almost fifteen years, and when I was a teenager, I used to put together my own zines. It's just natural for me to translate that into blogging. -
February 10th, 2009 at 4:38pmI too joined Facebook back when it was 'exclusive', but was only one of probably twenty people at my school to do so and as such let my account languish, until well into the period after it was opened to the whole world and people who prod me into doing things started to use it. But I join everything. It's just a habit of mine. So why do I blog? I see my site as having 2 aims. The first is to share stuff with whoever finds it interesting, be that stuff musings about the state of the car industry or my opinions on a movie I just watched, to complaints about some scammer or a video of my daughter doing something cute. If nobody reads them, so be it - I know the people who occasionally are interested in that sort of thing (my parents, etc) will stumble across it eventually and when they do, it's there. I can be so casual in that sentiment because of the second purpose for blogging: so I can remember stuff. I love trawling the archives to read what I've written years ago because, frankly, the way I remember it, if I remember it at all, cannot compare to how I thought of it, or experienced it, back then. So the primary reader of my site, really, is me. And Google. But I also use my twitter account, almost once a day, and since August of 2008 I've only written two new posts - have I switched from being a blogger to being a tweeter? Nope. I update twitter, sure, but with stuff that doesn't require more than 140 characters to convey. Years ago I used to have a 'hot thots' page on my website for much the same thing - if I could fit it on a line in pico, that's where it got posted on my site. It's another record, though not as important to me as anything on my own domain. If ever it seems that twitter may go away, I'll try to retrieve them, but if I can't, I won't cry about it. Which leads me to Facebook. I cross-post my twitter updates to Facebook, and don't mind when people comment on them. In fact, that's fine with me, because it makes them think I'm engaging in their community when, frankly, I'd rather not. Though I join all these social networks, I honestly have no skill in using them past the 'amassing a list of acquaintances and friends' bit. I see other users posting lots of photos and linking them in meta-data-significant ways; I see people commiserating with each other about sad things; I see people becoming 'fans' of bands, people, foods, companies, and even books for reasons I can only assume correlate to similar fannish behavior in real life. They'd put the bumper stickers on their cars, and I bet many of them do. I don't put bumper stickers on my car, and I don't join up as a 'fan' of something on Facebook for the reason that if there's no benefit to me for doing it, I'm not wasting my time. I know what books I like and what music I enjoy, and adding my name to a list and being able to post to yet another public forum isn't that big a draw to me. But I don't shun people who do those sorts of things - they're all over the place and all of us probably know one or two, or a couple hundred. They love a site like Facebook because it can offer them any possible thing they'd want to do on the web at large (email, photo posting, blogging, twitter-like updates, public and private conversations, IM, stupid games, etc) but all in one place with a common backend and userbase such that if one finds something cool, they don't even need to leave the site to send it to all their buddies who would likewise be interested in it. Facebook should be the downfall of stupid chain emails. It won't, but I wish it would. It will reduce them significantly in the coming years. So I blog for my memory. I tweet for fun, and occasionally to get messages around to people. And I've got a Facebook account for people who can't get up to speed with the first two things, or aren't interested that much. -
February 10th, 2009 at 5:23pmIt goes in bursts. Everything in my universe is cyclical. I spend a lot of (possibly too much) time on identi.ca. I like the immediacy. I like the enforced brevity. I like the community. I enjoy writing. Whenever anoyone asks 'Why did you start blogging ? Why you keep blogging', my answer is always simply because 'I enjoy writing'. I'm not writing for the Google one-hit wonders. I'm not writing for my handful of RSS subscribers. I am writing for one person. Me, myself and I. Similarly, I have endured crises of confidence where I have ditched all of my various social networking presences (FriendFeed, Tumblr etc), expunged every single last output and committed Web 2.0 Hari-Kari with a ceremonial sword. So, I suspect I'll probably always have an identi.ca account and maintain a blog. I view them as different tools. I've experimented with an identi.ca badge on my blog but ditched it although, perversely, I proudly announce my blog posts on identi.ca. -
February 10th, 2009 at 7:35pmI post to my personal blog for two reasons: a) information posted to Facebook/MySpace aren't searchable in Google so if I don't post it on my blog, no-one but my friends will ever see it; b) I like to know what topics I've written about that people are finding interesting. Facebook/Myspace don't currently allow me to see detailed logs of who accesses my content when. I'm on Facebook/Myspace because a handful of people I know are too, and they use that as their primary mechanism for keeping in touch with the world. I don't find it too difficult to ignore the crap, so I find it just worth it to keep those connections. -
February 11th, 2009 at 10:34pmAnother thought-provoking post! I started my blog as a way to tell my family and friends what I was doing when I was in Peace Corps, without having to say it in a 150 emails to different people, and that didn't make me feel like I was spamming people. If they wanted to read my posts, they could; if they didn't, they didn't have to. Then I started to realize that OTHER people were reading my posts, and it felt weird. Then it was kinda cool and I found myself wondering if this post would warrant a "trackback" on GlobalVoices. Then I started writing to try to get a trackback on GV. Then I stopped caring about "the rest of the world", and it also felt like my friends weren't reading my blog anyway, so why bother. It's a question I've been asking myself for awhile - why do I keep this blog? I'm not sure anymore. The relationships that are most important to me, I do keep track of by email, phone/Skype and visits when possible. I still write when I feel like it, but I'm very conscious that more people I don't know read my blog than I do know, so I am more careful than I used to be (like with upcoming travel plans, personal opinions that overlap with my work role, etc). I'm not ready to let go of the archive that's on my blog, but I question the value and purpose of my ongoing blog. I feel more and more restricted in what I can or should write for the public domain, which limits me and my blog. Facebook, I think, is stupid. I am on it, I check it occassionally, but I think I've maxed out the potential to reconnect with the few people from high school that I would be interested in reconnecting with. Now I feel bombarded with spam. I've adopted a very strict FB friend policy for myself, and I almost never approve new "friends" and even try to disassociate with some people I previously linked with. If I don't care what they are doing on a weekly basis, I don't need to be their friend on FB. Wow, this might actually spark a post on my own blog. :-) -
February 11th, 2009 at 11:33pmI started blogging as a way of recording how I solved various technical problems; installing software, system administration issues I'd dealt with, that sort of thing. It was purely a place to record things so I didn't have to go through the same process of finding out when I next came across the same problem. The thing was, I enjoyed playing around with the blogging software, which was WordPress at the time. Then I came across Habari, and I enjoyed playing with that software even more, and on top of that, there was a great community that I became involved with. I started writing about Habari things, still mostly recording things for me, but also with a mind that someone else might find them useful. I started to write on different topics too, thoughts on the Web, programming, the occasional travel entry. I also think it's a really powerful thing to capture your thoughts, or at least try to. Lots of things go through my mind every day, but it has to be a powerful thought to stay lodged there without committing it to some permanent storage. So while I still write mostly for myself, I am aware that there may be some small audience. Would I stop writing if there was no audience ? No, but I'd probably go back to mostly using the blog to record my technical failures. -
February 12th, 2009 at 1:28pmI have found Twitter to be nearly useless to me. I use it now and again, but usually I completely forget it's there. I blog for much the same reasons others do who have posted here. I have thoughts, and more specifically poetry and art, that I'd like to share, and I post them on my blog. Blogging gives me a very flexible venue for self-expression. Facebook, for me, is as invaluable a tool as blogging. I'm a military kid, and most of the people who shaped me profoundly when I was growing up are scattered across the globe, in Germany, Korea, Japan, Iraq, or just on the other side of the US. I can't go back to a hometown. But I can keep close (or loose) track of folks who remind me where I came from, and I can do it easily and daily on Facebook. Maria -
February 12th, 2009 at 10:53pmFacebook is more about social networking than blogging. I social network way more offline than online and have only recently started paying attention to Facebook. I've been recruiting my offline contacts to get Facebook accounts so we can talk at our convenience rather than while I'm in a hurry moving from point A to B. Most of them are scared about publishing anything. I'm also trying to start Facebook groups and pages to have groups of real people connect and share online. The Information Age is upon us. And these social networks allow us to connect at a level that was not possible before. I don't blog, but I do social network. 
February 16th, 2009-
February 18th, 2009 at 5:29amThe short answer is, I don't know, and I'm not sure I need to know. But since this is all about figuring out the answer, I guess I'll play along. A good place to start with figuring out why I blog is probably to look at the content and see where that leads me, and the answer is that it's mostly personal. There's some tech stuff in there (I have a less than totally obscure WP plugin that people seem to like). I rant in a fairly banal way about things that shit me (technical, social and political things in approximately equal measures). I also occasionally use it as a diary, and to post things that are only likely to be of interest to my close friends and family. From time to time, I think about getting focused with my blog (or with another purpose built blog). Trying to really craft my desired online identity/reputation. I also from time to time think about the possibilities of monetising it. Building a real audience and focusing on SEO. Then I think about how much work all that would be and I decide I've got more interesting (and probably rewarding) things to devote my time to. Having said all that, I think the real answer is simply that I love the internet and the possibilities it presents in all kinds of ways. I love things like XFN, micro-formats, APIs and aggregation. I love programming (which came as kind of a surprise to me) and am passionate about things like web standards and elegance in all kinds of code. BTW, I've decided to cross post this to my blog, since I usually turn any comment I'm going to make that's longer than a paragraph or so into a post/trackback. And that leaves me a nice segue into a post/comment on 'Why do you comment?" But I'm going to leave that for another day. - February 18th, 2009