[randrews]

A dissenting opinion:

Writing a blog helps you organize your thoughts, improves your writing skills, and teaches you to make good arguments (and recognize bad ones).

None of that requires having an audience. At least an audience larger than your friends and coworkers.

If you like to write, don't stop writing because it's not "where the buzz is at". There's more to life than following trends.

[acgourley]

Well said. In addition to that, I use my blog to host content I hope people will find via google, like how-tos or coding gotchas. I'm not going to post a coding trick to my facebook account, even if it has more active readers.

[randrews]

Exactly. Some content, like status updates, is perfect for Twitter or Facebook, but this article seems to assume that that's all anyone uses blogs for.

Please god say it ain't so. I would like to think that people who keep blogs (at least the subset thereof that also read Wired) tend to write more interesting things in them, and I can't imagine that being replaced by 140 characters (this notwithstanding: http://twitter.com/_why/statuses/881768089 )

[alex_c]

If this is actually a ploy to get pointless blogs out of Google's index and hidden behind Facebook's garden wall, then I'm all for it!

[DanielBMarkham]

You can also write in your blog for your great-great-great-grandkids -- family that hasn't been born yet. Or you can write as a way of organizing book material. Or you can write as a way to keep and share memories with just a few people.

Blogging is an internal thing first, external second.

[davidw]

> write in your blog for your great-great-great-grandkids

You think stuff we are producing these days will last? I'm dubious. Paper lasts a decent amount of time, but digital media?

[DanielBMarkham]

I do. In fact, I think blogging is the next best thing to a resurrection machine. I'll guess there are ten places on the net that cache this stuff (including this comment)

Even now, you'll see people post an article here from five or six years ago. It might have 100 comments on it. Five or Six commenters might already be dead -- including the article's author.

Now multiply that by 50. Most of the net will end up being written by dead people.

I blogged about this a while back -- http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/09/the_dead_spea...

[davi]

Yes, I've had this thought: that this is the beginning of the "high density" version of recorded history.

That, barring a cataclysmic implosion of civilization, the internet archives being populated now will likely be available for perusal 10,000 years from now.

As a corollary thought, an interesting exercise might be to only generate content -- movies, essays, fiction, non-fiction, whatever -- that you think people 10,000 years from now will find interesting. How does this constrain what projects to undertake?

[pg]

One way to make things that will be interesting in the future is to make things that are interesting now and would have been interesting in the past. If you can span a few thousand years back in time, there's a good chance you have something fairly universal.

This is another reason to study history: so you can imagine what people a thousand years ago would have liked.

[DanielBMarkham]

Along those lines, looking back at the Greeks -- many of the same subjects we talk about today they discussed 2,000 years ago.

[DanielBMarkham]

Or as a variation on the Turing Test, create a program that reviews all of your published material, then continues to comment and participate in discussions long after you are gone based on the material you consumed and the comments you made while you were alive -- in effect, transforming you into some sort of virtual living dead.

Somehow I feel compelled to add an evil laugh at this point.

[unalone]

That's what I thought originally. Now I use Indexhibit to manage my site and when I've got a good idea, I write it as an essay, publish it when it's revised. I also give a link to my HN threads page, since I'd think that most of my talking about intellectual matters happens here, and since here you can follow the discussions I'm in and really get some good debates.

I think that the idea of a personal "blog" is dead. Other mediums have really taken precedence. Very few blogs really stand out to me, nowadays; my favorite ones tend to be more unique implementations, such as BigContrarian and Kottke. Wordpress blogs look old and dated in a lot of ways: they try too much to bridge the gap between the formal and the personal, and I think they lose out because of it.

[kalid]

Completely agree. My writing and thought process has improved a ton since I've been blogging. Even better, you get a chance to interact with people and discuss a deep thought more than a twitter message.