I blog to share my thoughts with myself, but in public. I blog with the intent of consolidating what I'd just learned or experienced in my mind. I've had some popular posts inbetween years of content that nobody cares about, and sometimes I'll have a reader email me about an old post I wrote and describe how it's helped them in a recent project. Or sometimes someone will comment about how they just saw a post mentioned in a conference slide, and they're commenting on it _from_ the conference. Or I'll notice traffic coming in from an online newsletter about some programming topic. Those emails and brief spikes make me feel nice. The occasional acknowledgement from a reader is like a bonus to what's essentially a private diary I don't expect anyone to take interest in.
I get that idea and it’s not new: one blog said in its subtitle “letting google index my thoughts”. But it’s the equivalent of talking out loud. Sure someone might hear you accidentally and benefit but most of the time it should be kept to ourselves. If something should be said, it should probably be written in a book. That will set at least some bar to prevent the constant stream of noise on the internet. Everyone complains about the quality of content going downhill and the signal to noise ratio being unbalanced but the solution is for all of us to consider that we’re probably generating a lot more noise than signal. So I for one will quit blogging and comment a lot more rarely and if I have something more important to say I’ll write a book. Getting published isn’t infallible of a mark of signal but it’s better than git push.
Most of the kinds of posts I get positive feedback on aren't something I'd ever consider interesting or important enough for a book. Personally I don't have a problem with blog noise/"talking out loud" on the internet. I think it's more up to the people who don't want noise to decide what noise is for them and to implement their own filter strategies. I can't even count how many times I stumbled across some blog post casually written that the author likely didn't expect to be noticed at all, but which provided some useful or just plain interesting information to me. It wouldn't make it into a book, but I'm glad it made it into this person's little corner of the Internet for me to discover.
