I have always thought of blogs as being written primarily for the author. Maybe they write because they enjoy writing, or to think through something, or to leave notes for later.

When someone does it for the audience I always consider it more of a publication. Maybe that just semantics, but that's been the distinction for me.

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TrueDuality 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I write primarily as a means to collect my thoughts and outcomes around projects. I keep analytics on my site not to optimize for any particular audience but because it feels validating and that I'm contributing in another form.

I still see high traffic on a post explaining oddities in some of Route53's unintuitive behaviors and hope I'm making someone's day a little better in giving them a solution.

That drives me to write more.

	▲	dgfitz 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation, makes sense. I’m more on the side of the author. I write to get my own ideas out of my head. I don’t even publish them, not yet anyways. But if I ever do, I also won’t use analytics. I fear it would somehow bias me into writing for bigger numbers, and I don’t want to do that.

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xattt 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People seem to confuse writing in a blog with writing in a personal journal as part of self-therapy. Think “long-winded” posts on Livejournal.

It’s hard to engage in good-faith discussions because individuals may not have thought about the “why” yet, and it would be an embarrassing moment to be caught mid-discussion.

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echoangle 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I would count blogs as a type of publication. I would say that everything that’s published on purpose is a publication.