Blogging every day — a success?

Due to QEDcon over last weekend I seem to have let the momentous occasion of my 300th Evil Burnee post go by without comment. I'll correct that omission with this brief, meandering rant about blogging in general, why I blog, and what it's been like blogging every day this year (so far).

This is actually (I think) the 307th post. I knew I was approaching 300 — and that I'd pass it soon — when I decided at the beginning of 2011 to post something every day for a month. Previously I posted when I felt like it. Sometimes an event in the news, an item on the radio, or something online would prompt me to ponder and urge me to write. That was fine, if I got around to actually writing about it. Sometimes there'd be a delay (life, you know?); sometimes I'd even have a few notes, but often the timeliness of the post in prospect would pass, and it perhaps didn't seem appropriate to post something retrospectively when there were other more pressing items of interest to blog about. If I got around to them.

So I resolved to experiment with (at least) one post per day, and for January 2011 it went well. Five original blogposts per week, plus two lists of Burnee links, kept the stream going. February has been a little different, with QED intervening (not that I stopped blogging during the weekend — operational netbook permitting), and other matters squeezing my blogging time. Nevertheless I'm keeping it up, albeit with a number of slightly backdated posts needing perforce to be retrofitted.

I blog to clarify my thoughts — sometimes I'm unsure what I really think until I write it down — and to let others know my position if they're interested. ("Others" could of course include my future self: Notes from an Evil Burnee provides a record of my position on a range of issues, as well as being a useful repository of links to online articles I've found interesting for one reason or another, at one time or another.)

And the discipline of blogging every day has been useful in encouraging engagement with the issues at hand. It's all very well hearing or reading something during the day and thinking, "Maybe I'll write something about that at the weekend, or next week, or...." Much more useful, productive and motivating to think, "I'll write about that tonight."

So the experiment has been successful, and will continue. Many more words to come.