Why write a blog?

Before I had a blog, I wondered why people wrote them. Now that I have one, I wonder why other people write theirs. Because I know my reasons, and I am sure they are not shared by many other people.

I've always been the kind of person who liked learning and thinking about a lot of different things. Inevitably this means that I wind up having opinions on diverse topics. Which means that I regularly run into things that I have opinions about that I couldn't share because nobody in my immediate environment really cared. This blog has become a place for me to say those things. If nobody cares to listen, I still enjoyed getting my thoughts in electronic form.

Now to reasons I don't do the blog. I don't do it to share my personal life. My personal life is private, and the people I want to tell it to can hear about it directly from me. I don't do the blog for economic reasons. Admittedly I turned on ads out of curiosity for what it would be like. But to date I've made less than what I usually spend on lunch. I've made less than I get from 5 minutes of paid contract work, and have no shortage of potential contract work available right now. I don't do it out of desire for fame. I've seen enough fame in my life. And besides the built-in audience when I spent years posting on Perlmonks is much bigger than I'm going to get with a random blog.

So this blog is an outlet for expressing thoughts of a kind I've always had. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Now what triggered this particular post? It was a comment on my first entry that thought I was missing a big opportunity by not writing more about that topic and taking advantage of my current position as an expert. I simply don't see things that way.

Over my life I've been seen by people as an expert on a number of things. Lately I've been compensated fairly well for my expertise in Perl, A/B Testing, and general data manipulation. I don't think that being seen as an expert on spaced repetition learning would add much. I've also become moderately well-known in multiple communities. There is no need for me to try to become well-known for having taught a course. So I don't see the opportunity.

Furthermore there is a cost. I've always disliked people who took a good idea or story and expanded it with fluff to make the most of it. Why would I seek to be a kind of person I don't like? It makes no sense to me.

The same will go in the future. If I say my piece on a topic and don't feel I have more to say, I won't say more. If I say more it is because I feel I have more to say.