Why do you blog?
Abstract
I began blogging on 24 September 1999, before “blog” was the common term. What started as a private, diary-like habit has evolved into a multi-site practice that spans personal reflection, teaching resources, archival work, and scholarly inquiry. Drawing on my longitudinal experience and a body of literature on blogging, digital scholarship, and memory, this post argues that blogging functions as (1) a thinking tool, (2) an e-portfolio and public notebook, (3) a dissemination channel between journalism and scholarship, and (4) a community practice that develops voice, craft, and networks. I close with pragmatic implications for academics and students who are deciding whether—and how—to blog.
Introduction: From “Online Journal” to Digital Scholarship
When I posted to my first “online journal” in 1999, the dominant mode was intimate and iterative: you wrote daily, mostly “among friends,” and authenticity trumped polish. The subsequent proliferation of formats—corporate blogs, microblogs, podcasts, video channels—has blurred boundaries between diary, magazine, classroom, and broadcast. Through this shifting landscape, my own practice has remained anchored in one question: why blog at all?
My answer comes from three sources:
Longitudinal practice. I blogged daily for the first four years; later, I specialised across several sites (learning journal; swimming coaching; First World War oral history; ed-tech experiments). Formal study. The MA in Open & Distance Education (MAODE) and the H818 Networked Practitioner module sharpened my sense of blogging as method, not just medium. Literature. Research on blogs, digital scholarship, and memory illuminates both the promise and limits of blogging in education and public knowledge.
What “Counts” as a Blog?
The word now covers many things—some of which are not blogs in any meaningful sense: marketing brochures, magazines, audiovisual channels, or photo dumps. My original frame—shaped by early platforms like Diaryland—was that a blog is serial, reflective, tagged, and personally voiced, with an implied community of readers who may be known rather than mass. That said, the affordances (open access, chronology, hypertext, multimedia) scale to support teaching, public engagement, and research conversation.
My Trajectory and Use-Cases
1) Learning Journal & Portfolio (since 2010)
A tagged, searchable record of module activities and reflections. Roughly 40% private, 60% shared. It functions as an e-portfolio, a cognitive scaffold, and a map of what I’ve learned and can apply.
2) Swimming Teaching & Coaching
A dormant site that still outperforms others by daily traffic because it is useful: answers to practical questions, especially lesson plans. That datapoint matters—utility drives readership.
3) First World War Oral History
That’s Nothing Compared to Passchendaele began as my grandfather’s memoir (machine-gunner; hours of recorded interviews, photographs). To respect the material and its audience, I am reframing it less as “a blog” and more as a curated digital book with citations and context.
4) Quick Response (QR) Codes in Education
Born of H818 conference work, this small blog explores QR codes to connect war memorial names to deeper biographies—micro-interventions that turn remembrance into networked inquiry.
Across these sites I’ve learned a hard truth: some projects are better treated as books—or at least as book-like—demanding editorial discipline, versioning, and a publication horizon.
Twelve Functions of Academic Blogging (Condensed and Updated)
Dissemination. Preprints for ideas: from lab-notes to lectures, from blog to paper/book. Reputation & Voice.
Thought leadership beyond institutional channels.
Teaching Support. Lecture notes, extensions, FAQs; a place to reflect with students.
Faculty PR & Recruitment.
Human-scale narratives that attract people to modules and labs.
Community of Practice.
Participation in a networked field; finding and being found.
Digital Literacies. Working fluency with web genres, tagging, linking, and process visibility.
Multimodality. Text, image, audio, and video as epistemic tools, not mere decoration.
Idea Incubator. Safe space to trial styles, hypotheses, prompts, and narrative frames.
Engagement & Reciprocity. Commenting, linking, and co-developing lines of inquiry.
Production Craft. Iterative practice in editing, curation, and public reasoning. E-Portfolio.
A longitudinal record: claims, evidence, feedback, revision.
Intrinsic Satisfaction. The durable pleasure of shaping thought in public.
Blogging, Learning, and Evidence: What the Research Says (and Doesn’t)
The scholarship on blogging in higher education is mixed but instructive:
Motivations and contexts matter. Students’ willingness to blog depends on audience, assessment, feedback culture, and how the activity aligns with disciplinary norms (Kerawalla, Minocha, Kirkup & Conole, 2009). Not a universal solvent.
In some settings students contribute haphazardly, avoid reflection, or stop once assessment ends; benefits don’t appear by magic (Krause, 2004; Williams & Jacobs, 2004; Homik & Melis, 2006). But it is a scholarly practice. Blogging now sits within “digital scholarship” (Boyer’s discovery, integration, application, teaching; Weller, 2011/2012), providing quicker, more open circulation of ideas and a complementary layer to peer review (Bishop, 2013). Communities leave traces. Studies of weblog networks show how conversation, linking, and genre conventions coalesce over time (Anjewierden, 2006). Produsers, not just users. Bloggers are producers-users who shape knowledge communities (Bruns; Efimova, 2008).
Inference: blogging is most effective when it is integrated into authentic disciplinary practice, when audience and feedback are real, and when it supports—not substitutes—formal scholarship.
Blogging and Memory: Beyond “Total Capture”
As a diarist from age 13½, I have always been drawn to memory’s stubborn analog core. Lifelogging technologies promise “total capture,” yet evidence suggests archives are rarely accessed and do not automatically support remembering; cues that prompt reconstruction may matter more than complete records (Sellen & Whittaker, 2010; Whittaker, Bergman & Clough, 2010). Blogging’s strength is exactly that: selective, contextualised cues—tags, a paragraph, an image—that re-ignite rich, reconstructive memory. In other words, curation over capture.
Why I Blog (Now): A Position Statement
To think in public. Writing clarifies thought; publishing invites friction that improves it. To remember with structure. Tags, dates, and links turn lived time into a navigable archive. To be useful. Posts that solve problems (e.g., swimming lesson plans) justify the effort. To honour sources. Family histories, interviews, and field notes deserve a rigorous home. To rehearse scholarship. Blog → talk → paper → chapter. The cadence accelerates learning. To belong. Communities of practice—the “networked practitioner”—are sustained by visible, iterative contributions.
Practical Implications
For Academics
Treat your blog as a scholarly instrument: cite, link, version, and reflect. Align posts to projects (grants, modules, books) and audiences (students, peers, publics). Use editorial rhythms (series, seasons) and book-like discipline when the material warrants it. Build feedback loops (comments, cross-posts, seminar responses) so blogging feeds research.
For Students
Use blogging as a learning journal and e-portfolio; keep some private, publish the rest. Write for a real audience (your cohort; your field), not an empty box. Prioritise selective curation over total capture; aim for cues that will help future-you.
Conclusion
I blog because it is the right balance of diary, draft, and discourse—a medium where private thinking meets public knowledge. It is more than a habit: it is a method that helps me learn, remember, teach, and contribute. Not every course needs blogging; not every project belongs on a blog. But where authenticity, iteration, and community matter, blogging remains one of the most humane and generative tools we have.
Selected References & Further Reading
Bishop, D. (2013). Blogging as post-publication peer review: reasonable or unfair? LSE Impact of Social Sciences. Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Efimova, L. (2008). Bloggers and “produsers.” Kerawalla, L., Minocha, S., Kirkup, G., & Conole, G. (2009). An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education. Sellen, A., & Whittaker, S. (2010). Beyond total capture: A constructive critique of lifelogging. Communications of the ACM, 53(5), 70–77. Whittaker, S., Bergman, O., & Clough, P. (2010). Long-term family photo retrieval. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 14(1), 31–43. Weller, M. (2011/2012). The Digital Scholar; The virtues of blogging as scholarly activity. Williams, J., & Jacobs, J. (2004). Exploring the use of blogs in higher education. Krause, S. (2004). When blogging goes bad: A cautionary tale. Anjewierden, A. (2006). Understanding weblog communities through digital traces.
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