The ChickenGoddess recently posted a post in which she asked why we all blog, and it got me to thinking (most of this is my comment to that post). Why do I, in fact, blog? About anything?
I’ve been blogging about things pretty consistently for the past seven years, though mostly drivel and mostly on LiveJournal (you won’t see much, because it’s friends-only, but the link is there for you to find if you want).
The reason I started blogging about knitting (other than the peer pressure that drove me to it initially) is that
1. It gives me motivation to push through projects, because once I’ve posted about them, many people know I’m working on them. Even if they don’t hold me accountable, I feel as though they do, and that’s just as good. As a consequence, I want to keep on working, so that I can show progress, and so that the guilt doesn’t completely overwhelm me (guilt, even the imagined kind, is a marvelous motivational tool).
2. Like knitting itself, blogging about knitting creates an instant community. I’m a huge fan of social networking, and if I do it through a blog, I can control the content, and I don’t have to use MySpace. Because I’m sharing the same sorts of things others are sharing, I feel like I’m part of this world of knitters who all understand me (and I understand them).
3. I’m an egomaniac and I like to say that I’m on the internet. It’s like visualizing hearing myself talk.
I blog because I love sharing cool things with other people. You know how sometimes you find something so overwhelmingly cool that you can’t keep it to yourself? That’s what the blog is for. It’s for ideas you can’t help sharing, websites you’ve found that you can’t help sharing, and in the case of knitting, a project that you’re so proud of that you have to show the entire world, or at least the entire virtual world. Through the wonders of flickr and the blogosphere, all of that is possible (and then some).
And that’s pretty much what it boils down to. I blog because I knit, and I knit because I blog and though circular, it works perfectly for me.
knitters = angry mob 
I was a huge LJ junkie before getting my first blogger blog.. and after the dot.com it just got worse because then I was “paying” to blog so I really had better use the space. My short answer is that I also do it for the ‘community’ feel.. its nice to have people who get why I play with fiber.