There’s been a lot of well-deserved attention on Andrew Sullivan’s “Why I Blog.” I highly recommend the article.
It made me think about a post I wrote in 2004 in reaction to two of my all-time favorite blog posts. The post was called Why Do We Blog and pointed to a post on the Sandhill Trek blog that collected reflections from 36 bloggers on why they blog.
It’s instructive to contrast the reasons for blogging you see in that post with the heavy emphasis you get these days on the marketing and SEO value of blogging as well as the occasional admonition to avoid the personal element in business blogs. I always have preferred to keep Dave Winer’s notion of blogging – the unedited voice of a person – firmly in mind when blogging.
There are many reasons to blog and Andrew highlights some great ones. You’ll definitely want to read his article. And, since my approach of using a “money quote” is an homage to Andrew, it’s only appropriate to give you a money quote from his article:

Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

However, I’ll end this post with the reason for blogging that has always resonated the most with me. It comes from Lisa Williams back in 2004:

Why do I blog?
because I cannot
play the guitar.

And why do you blog?
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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