Most people still think *publicly* sharing their ideas and thoughts is weird. "Why would I do that in public?"

What made you realize that blogging, tweeting, etc. was worth your while?

Was it realizing that people would listen (view counts, followers), that people would talk back (comments, @replies), or something else?

Feel free to add other people!

I started doing this when I was 20/21, so in 1995. The motive was simple: I wanted to be a writer, and writers wrote. Since getting published has always been a really tough thing, and since I loved computers, the Web seemed natural. I set a goal when I was 21: I would write for ten years, and at the end of them I hoped to call myself a writer. Since you needed some programming skills to create a website, I learned to program. Within those ten years I got a novel deal and wrote for a lot of places, including for radio. So I met my goal. But I also fell totally, permanently in love with the web and databases and understanding the new world that was being built, in a way that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

I got an apartment that was $500 cheaper per month, by asking on my blog. I met the couple that introduced me to my wife. I upgraded from being a guy with a job to a guy with a career. I connected to most of my best friends in the comments on my blog, or on theirs. I got to meet my heroes. I got to be corrected in my mistakes by the people who I was speaking about. I had my mind changed on countless issues by people responding to my blog with smart arguments. Yesterday morning, a guy called me about an article I wrote for public consumption, saying he was completely politically opposite from me, but what he'd read had connected with him as a father. One time one of my readers sent me a spatula. Ashley Judd retweeted me.

My very first blog c. 2001 was a group blog started by a friend very much in the Metafilter style. I was amazed at what my closest friends were sharing online. Even the way they spoke was completely different than the way they did in real life.

No one ever read this blog except for the people who posted to it but bc it was public, the contributors pitched their voices in an entirely different way than they would in private. I thought that was really fascinating and I think that core issue of persona and how the form can entice people to create identities is still what interests me most about the Internet.

My motivations were started out similar to Paul's. I was learning design and about the web, and I've always felt that writing about something you're learning makes it stick. Making it public (although at that time nobody read my stuff) was my way of making it "real."

I learned pretty quickly that, as people were beginning to read my stuff, there was great value in the community aspect. So I embraced that. My old blog brought me so much opportunity, joy and learning. The writing was my primary motivation, but I also met so many great people and through them I learned and grew so much.

Things are a bit different now, in practice, but the community is still a solid motivator for sharing. As is the "get it out there and it'll be real" factor.

My very first blog was started during my freshman year of college as a method of keeping my parents informed about my life without having to make a phone call every couple of days. The nice thing about that, I think, is that it forced my writing style to be more conversational than academic (even today, I still generally write like I talk).

Professionally, I had a lot of false-starts to blogging. Half of the problem was one of discipline. The other half was feeling like I didn't have anything of value to say. As I grew as a designer, though, I found myself wanting to participate in our industry's dialogue more and more often. When Svbtle launched, the original rules were that you had to publish once every two weeks. That solved the...

discipline problem (deadlines tend to do that). The deadline also made me start writing about topics I not only knew, but also some that I was unsure of. What I finally realized was that writing isn't so much about having something to say that you know is valuable. Rather, it's about trying to add value by teasing out a new perspective or angle and riffing on that idea until you're somewhere completely new (even if you wind up being wrong).

I've always blogged and tweeted without thinking about it too much, but this year made me see it in a different way. In May I was invited to speak in Hamburg, Germany at a library conference and in October I was invited to speak at a conference in Monterrey, CA. And my trips were paid for! I never did much traveling with my family while growing up, so this was really exciting to me. It felt like I had "made it".

Plus, I got my BA in Creative Writing so it sorta felt like those four years at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania was time well spent.

I spent 7 years in finance, which is industry in which employees aren't really supposed to blog or tweet...especially not about work! When I started to consider switching industries, I realized that I had nothing to use to sell myself to a new field beyond a piece of paper. Starting a blog and creating a public twitter account gave me the chance to create a kind of "portfolio of thoughts." Even with a tumblr follower count of 0, I found myself getting emails from companies I had written about and people interested in the topics I cared about. The blog helped me find a job in a totally different industry. I don't think it's necessary to blog every day to derive benefits. Public publishing starts conversations.

Never occurred to me to *not* share ideas in public. My intro to tech was via desktop publishing, specifically moving to things like Pagemaker from laying out my highschool newspaper manually. Once i got on usenet and such it was clear the web is powered by people.