Well, Marc Andreessen has been tearing up the blogging world, with prolific excellent writing including his series on the truth about venture capitalists and his ongoing series on startups, among others. But after 5 weeks of blogging, he has written about 11 lessons he’s learned from blogging. It’s an interesting read, and I think every blogger wants to be a little self referential, as the feelings tha blogging evokes are powerful. Heck, I did it myself. I hope he proceeds back to regular content, as opposed to blogging about blogging, quickly, but I do think he makes some strong points, especially #5:
Fifth, writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.
I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).
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I encourage everyone who is interested in not being a commodity to blog (and that pretty much means everyone!). Because of the widespread distribution, if you have something interesting to say (and I believe pretty much everyone does), you can quickly gain readership. It’s the best form of marketing for individuals that there is.
That doesn’t mean blogging is easy–there are posts I’ve written on this blog that, as I read back over them from a few years on, are rather embarrassing (technical mistakes, pompous pontifications, etc). But the benefits to having a nearly four year public collection of my thoughts and interests including some very useful and articulate posts, outweighs the less than stellar bits.
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