A wheel spinning to bake my ideas

This is a copy of a comment to a comment at Blogroots, where whir wrote:

I’ve often wondered why people don’t pay more attention to the link between Usenet and other online forms of writing. I think one could say that email’s “short, informal” format is also a precursor to blogs, and that all three formats reflect a general informal style of online prose.

I haven’t read docjohn’s article, but I think there’s an important difference between Usenet and blogs, regarding the audience for your posts.

On Usenet, you post to a news group where some topic is discussed. People interested in that topic subscribe to the news group, so it’s important to stay on topic and respect the subscribers.

As for weblogs, you own your weblog and you decide which topics are discussed. If someone doesn’t like what you write about, they can stop visiting your weblog or stop subscribing to it.

For a news group, this would be equivalent of adding that person to your killfile, but it isn’t good ethic to post anything you like with the motivation that people will killfile you if the don’t like you.

For me, this is an important distinction. When weblogging, I can post half-baked ideas or unfinished posts that I will return to later. I wouldn’t do that to a news group or mailing list.

Over time I return to subjects where my thoughts aren’t “fully baked” yet. If I would wait for them to bake, I would post much less. Posting early and often is essential for me, since posting sets off a virtuous circle – a wheel spinning to bake my ideas, if you understand what I mean.

(This post is related to this post – this post – and this post.)