The man knows how to take the thoughts that are in my head and crystallize them into engaging prose.

In Why write a book? this magician, Seth Godin, managed to explain some of the misgivings that I have about writing this blog ¹ and at the same time re-enforce to me the reasons why it is 1. good to write and 2. good to write and publish your work.

Granted, he is talking about a book but on the face of it he is talking about writing. Writing organizes your thoughts, which is a great thing. But anybody can write in a diary so why blog? Myself I prefer to write in electronic form to have something that is both searchable and up-datable. So why not write a private blog?

Lets go back a minute

I have another blog that I began writing back in 2004. I really enjoyed that experience as it allowed me to participate in an early, budding “web developer blogging community” of sorts and it allowed me to “meet” a lot of people in our industry as we commented on each others blogs and shared ideas.

Back then there were not that many blogs and there were certainly not that many people reading them. This helped ease my nervousness about publishing my thoughts and ideas in public but nonetheless I was always a little scared each time I published a post. And here is where Seth’s post comes in again, where he states:

I published a book today. My biggest and most important and most personal and most challenging book. A book that scared me.

I’ll admit that it was easier to write on my web dev blog because that niche was not very big. Here on my personal blog, my writing may not be so niche; the thoughts and ideas I share may be applicable and open to scrutiny to a wider audience. That scares me. This is a good thing. And so is the possibility of finding like minded and un-like minded people to build a community of peers. So today Seth Godin, and writing this post, helped me to define why I blog.

Now it’s time to start hitting the Publish button instead of Save Draft.