Late to the party

So I decided to set up a blog. I knew I am not an early adopter of this ‘blogging’ by any stretch phenomenon by any stretch - Wikipedia tells me that Blogger was founded an aeon (15 years) ago. However, it was still rather surprising to me that blogging as a phenomenon seemingly peaked about 5 years ago, according to Google search data anyway.

That fall in popularity probably owes a huge deal to the rise of the social networking giants of Twitter and Facebook. After all, why bother organizing your thoughts into coherent sentences and paragraphs when you can just release bite-sized commentary the moment it comes into your head, or even better, just post photos of your food.

I am however convinced that there is some real value in making the effort to maintain a blog. Over time, the use cases of other social networking sites, while conceivably broad in scope, has become narrower and narrower in practice. For example, in my peer group at least, the usage of Facebook’s notes feature, which would ostensibly allow for longer posts, has become completely non-existent. No one wants walls of text to interrupt their scroll down the misnomered ‘News Feed’ of memes and food photos. As such, a blog is still the most socially acceptable way to create and share long expository pieces on ideas and experiences.

To wrap it up in a neat little package, there are three main benefits I see in blogging. Firstly, it would provide much needed practice in organizing ideas, helping to ensure that I can hold my own in the great debates of the day. Secondly, this blog would act as a documentation of projects and ideas - because sometimes its not just the code that needs to be saved and shared. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it will hopefully act as a motivation for me to actually do things worth writing about.

So, here goes.