"Why I Blog"

Andrew Sullivan's fascinating article on blogging in the November ATLANTIC compares the process to the making of a ship's log (blog is from WeB LOG). A blog has the "sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages...As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful."

...a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.

No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

The whole article appears here.