Why do you blog?

What a great question with some equally interesting responses.

Here are some of my faves from a discussion posted on Sandhill Trek.

"Anne Mathewson of Fishbucket says,

Herman Melville put it best when he said, "We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results." A perfect description of blogging, don't you think?

I started blogging some years ago largely to pass time and share experiences. A small part of me, however, was selfishly hoping for admiration and affirmation; a shallow attitude I've long abandoned. Eventually, I discovered the joy found via "invisible threads" and "sympathetic fibers" - those human connections made along the way. Blogger tend to be a lovely comfort of strangers.

Dervala Hanley says,

When I set up my first Blogger account three years ago, the form asked for a tagline. For want of anything better, I put "A love letter." By the time I had fifty thousand words on the clock, it got a bit clearer what I'd meant by that.

It's all about lurve, baby.

I blog for the same reasons that Alistair Cooke read those Letters From America until he was ninety-six or seven. I'm an emigrant. My family is thousands of miles away, and my friends are scattered around the world. Each entry is a letter home, wherever that is, and it's also a letter _about_ home, wherever that might be.

It's a love letter to some kid not yet born, and to the friends, strangers, sisters, exes, and former classmates who might stop by. (Funny how those circles overlap.)

And it's mostly (even when I'm cranky) a letter about the things, people, and places that I love. I could store up enthusiasms until I burst, but writing them down is a better way to absorb and share them.

I haven't much interest in the debates that seem to go on--that weird A List thing, the blogging-versus-journalism angst, the schism between warbloggers and cat diarists. I'm not much of a linker or an argufier. I still hate the word 'blog'.

My blog is a message in a bottle with a FedEx tracking number. Hello World."

So why do you blog?