#1 reason that I created this weblog was to experiment with new technology. Okay, in March 2003 weblogs were hardly new tech, but they were for me. The blog was also not the central them of the site, but just one of many such experiments.

Sometimes you need to participate in something to understand it. At the time I was thinking more about learning Perl than the social experiment of blogging, but I’m open to learning unexpected lessons.

It is good to have a place to play. There’s a lot I can do right here on my own desktop, but it changes how I create stuff when there’s an audience. Even when its an audience of three, as it was in the early days, just going through the extra effort of making it work for someone else changes the experience. There is also no substitute for participation in understanding the nuances of a medium.

A blog is a comfortable sidebar for my experiment of the moment. The only comparable forum is the cube-side demo — grabbing a colleague for an impromptu “hey check this out” — which acheives a similar camraderie, but lacks the temporal independence and low impact of a blog entry.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

For a while I’ve been thinking about why I enjoy blogging. The reasons I created this weblog remain, but I’ve discovered more and different reasons over time. My approach has changed substantially since my second posting posed the question: Are blogs the vanity press of the Internet?

Since I’ve read and enjoyed many blogger top ten lists, I plan to write this list as a series of posts. As I write them, I’ll link them back from here for future reference. In chronological order:

#1: participatory geekiness
#2: gender issues
#3: giving back
#4: reverse search engine
#5: thinking practice: language is the vehicle of thought
#6: marking the passage of time
#7: writing practice: just do it
#8: finding my voice: just do it