Why does blogging matter?

1. It gives you a place to easily store interesting bits of information and ideas that you come across. Bits and bytes. Computer storage is cheap. Brain storage is unreliable. If I could I would dump everything I've ever learned into my computer. The computer is more efficient at searching than the brain is, and better at storage. We forget things. The computer doesn’t. With a blog, even better, the stored knowledge is on the net, accessible from any browser anywhere in the world.

2. Writing your thoughts down, on paper or computer, is a good mental discipline. It sharpens your intellect, it refines your thinking. It helps clarify your thoughts so that you communicate them better. It helps etch more clearly in that unreliable brain things that you might want to remember more clearly. And it puts you in the position of "creator" rather than passive consumer of content.

3. By opening up your blogs to comments, you invite the collective intelligence (hopefully) of your readers to add to your thoughts and to contribute to your knowledge. You've created a collaborative thought space.

4. Young people are blogging, en masse. One blogging site, Live Journal, cites 650,000 active accounts, 95% of which are from users under the age of 30. Blog sites are replacing home pages because of the ease of publishing, the depth of functionality, and the connections with other bloggers.

5. If you produce a website, your website will score higher in Google rankings (search engine results) if your site is a blog. Google rewards sites for rapidly changing content and links outbound and inbound from other sites, which is the nature of blogs.

6. Now anyone can publish. The best content will get the most exposure as more blogs link to it and more people comment to it. The publishing and distributing of content will become decentralized, shifting power away from the major media companies.