Benefits of Blogging

I recently came upon this blog post on the benefits of blogging. There are probably about a million posts on that topic already out there, so this is not breaking any new ground. The author discusses five advantages to blogging:

• It gives you a chance to contribute something of value to others.
• There are professional benefits to showing off your writing skills.
• Blogging makes writing easier.
• It helps you to think.
• It pushes you out of your comfort zone.

For me, the main benefit of public writing (which I prefer to do in a non-blog format most of the time) is the desire to help others. There is so much content out there right now, yet there’s a lot that hasn’t been written up at all, and a lot that needs “more varieties”.

Here’s what I mean by “varieties”. In the Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition, you start with an assumption that consumers value different varieties of a particular good. This allows for the possibility of different types of cars, different colors of paint, and different versions of any good you’d ever want to consume. There are many forms of transportation, but what is best for a child is not necessarily best for a healthy adult.

Take a post on a specialized topic from my field, economics. Let’s say you want to write about a new econometric estimator. There are many different ways you can write a blog post on that topic, all of which would be of interest to different audiences:

• A verbal explanation with examples of its usefulness for noneconomists.
• A technical introduction for economists with a limited background in econometrics.
• A technical discussion for economists specializing in that particular area of econometrics.

All three of these posts would be rather different. But we can go deeper. There’s not just three posts that could be written. Each author has her own applications in mind, her own writing voice, her own way of approaching the topic and making connections to other ideas. Each author can provide different software implementations (Stata, R, Matlab, Julia, Haskell, …) or no software implementation. Some will have a verbal focus with an expectation that the details can be found in the paper; some will feel that the technical details are the only reason to write a post on the topic.

These different post styles are all substitutes to some extent. A highly technical post with proofs wouldn’t substitute very well for a verbal post for noneconomists, but there’s a big gap between those two extremes. A Matlab user might very well be able to benefit from a post working through an R implementation that discusses issues with loading the data and interpreting the results. The Matlab user might have to choose between a brief Matlab post and a detailed R post. There is clearly an opportunity for substitution.

Moreover, it’s not that often that we search for information of this nature but we plan to limit ourselves to reading a single post. I don’t think I’ve ever made up my mind in advance that I’d read one and only one post on an economics topic. We find multiple posts when possible and we take what we can from all of them.

If we define a “profitable market” for a blog post as five or more people getting some benefit from the lifetime of the post, there is room for dozens (and possibly many dozens) of varieties of post on any given narrow topic. Clearly this definition is not the one you’re using if you’re intending to directly monetize your blogging efforts with ads or product sales.

If you write on topics with a long lifespan, the greatest value might come after more than five years has passed. For technical topics, it might be because “everyone already knows that”. Well, after many years working in a highly technical field where that is regularly assumed, I can without any hesitation say there is never a case where everyone already knows something. The barrier to entry gets steep after a few years.

I prefer to say I have a website rather than a blog. The distinction between writing for a website and writing for a blog is arbitrary. In practice, there’s too often a connotation of blogs as a tool for giving quick takes on current events, which is a task that bores me to tears. I’d much rather write about things after I’ve spent a few years thinking about them.

The reason I started this blog was to provide a timeline of things I found interesting on social media. If I see something on Twitter, I like it or retweet it, but after a few days it’s lost forever. This blog is my opportunity to create a record of the things I found worth my time to read. And every so often, as with this post, to write out my thoughts on the topic at hand.