Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for O’Reilly.Net on why he blogs which pretty much mirrors my own reasons — as a knowledge management tool to keep track of things he runs across. Doctorow writes,
Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful link and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. . . .
Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVO frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutiae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.
Some writers talk about/recommend keeping a journal on topics of special interest. I could never stand doing this, although it is indeed useful. But a weblog makes it easy to do this as well as — at least in my case — find patterns, make connections and (most importantly) quickly find that article that really impressed me two years ago.
This is what I think most of the professional journalists who have criticized weblogging fail to understand. Newspapers and magazine are great. I still read plenty of dead tree publications. But a weblog allows me to link disparate news stories together over a long time period.
Professional media criticism of how non-journalists uses the Internet to communicate is a constantly shifting ground that seems more opportunistic than principled. The first wave of criticism was that people were wasting their time on the Internet with trivial things like porn, games and Mahir fansites. The second wave of criticism was that, okay, people were talking about politics, religion, etc., but they were insulating themselves from any view that didn’t disagree with their own. The third wave of criticism wonders who exactly these webloggers think they are to be reading dozens of different news outlets and comparing, contrasting and criticizing the coverage.
Some of these folks seem to be holding on to their profession as special in much the same way that religious figures claim exclusive access to God. I have a lot of appreciation for friends who are editors and journalists and being an excellent journalist/editor is a lot more work than being a good blogger. But, on the other hand, it is not exactly rocket science either.
The biggest problem I have with webloggers is a tendency to be overly-credulous, but journalists are hardly immune from that as any number of high-profiled journalistic hoaxes attest to (anyone remember Janet Cooke?)