Dave Winer, who brought us blogging back in the nineties, shared on Twitter this week a post of his from 2017 in which he explained the importance of blogging for thinking.
You know some of blogging is about writing for other people, but I also write to organize my thinking. Scattering things all over the place makes me disorganized. I want it help me focus, to factor my thinking.
The best way I can think things through is to put them in writing. With the Internet, that writing has been on the Web.
AOL and Prodigy message boards, usenet groups, listservs, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all used by me to think out loud.
And since 2003, my blog. Best of all with my blog, I have a searchable library of my thinking and thoughts.
I search for past thinking and posts, directly on my blog, and on Google. Amazing how fast things I find things – and in a cohesive form with my thinking laid out for me, and others.
Much better than my wide-ruled composition notebooks in which I charted my thinking while developing my first legal tech company in the nineties and the beginnings of LexBlog.
I have a large box of those notebooks that’s too heavy to lift down in my garage.
I kept them so I’d have a library for myself – and maybe others. I also thought I’d write a book some day and I’d have all my notes.
Over twenty-five years later, I’ve haven’t turned to those notebooks one time.
I can barely read my writing and without the ability to search, it would be tough as heck to find what I was looking for. Let alone to skim through a period of time and make sense of my thinking.
My blog has it all over these notebooks. I have a searchable library of mostly cohesive articles and thinking in whatever length I wanted.
