Memed: Why Blog?

I saw this meme, waiting as a trap over at Fish Feet, and I considered falling for it and writing this up. Then Brian over at Laelaps threw down on me, so now I have to.

The question is "Why do you blog?", which is grammatically mildly problematic, given the current undefined state of the word "blog". Is it really a verb? Oh well, we'll just go with it. Never mind the status of the word "meme".

Previous victims of this meme have structured their responses as lists, so I'll keep going with that.

-- I started this blog strictly as a formality that enabled me to comment on Carlo's blog when he started. The first post makes this fairly clear. Eventually, Carlo got fed up (understandably) with my nit-picking pedantic criticisms on his blog, and challenged me to make something myself. I accepted that challenge.

-- I'm not very good at staying in touch with people, so rather than watching email or telephone contact wither from neglect, this blog allows my family and friends to hear from me without much effort specifically in that direction from me.

-- Writing serves as practice for writing. While scientific writing would obviously be the most useful practice for scientific writing, which is a big part of my career, I can partially justify some of the time I spend online as a method of improving my written communication skills.

-- I find I like reading what I have written. Even posts or comments merely hours old are interesting to me, though I'm not sure why. I like to occassionally flip back through the archives and read something I wrote months ago, and think about what I was thinking about then. Or something.

-- Venting my frustrations upon the unsuspecting internet public is somehow therapeutic. This is the prime justification for my increasingly-poorly-named Monday Rants. The other justification for them is that people seem to like them. At least, that's the inference I draw from the fact that my Tuesday readership is consistently the highest of the week (according to my probably-unreliable hit counter, anyway).

-- Maintaining a blog allows me to write out long, somewhat-well-formatted opinion pieces about topics that strike my interest, which I think is more polite than writing long, boring comments on other blogs. I can also claim home-territory rights here, like the right to delete comments that I don't like. This is a fun exercise of my authoritarian tendencies.

Now I suppose I've got to inflict this upon five other unsuspecting folks. Who are my regular readers who also blog? I wonder if I have five who have themselves not yet been memed in this way.
Carlo, Langmann, King Aardvark, Bronze Dog, Infophile, take it or leave it, I pass this on to you.

Note that Bronze Dog and Infophile probably don't qualify as "regular readers" around here, but perhaps they'll get the message.

I'm supposed to now illustrate the history of this meme. I don't feel like putting in all those links right now, so I'll say that Brian at Laelaps directly passed it to me, and he's got a pretty good pedigree up for those who are interested. The originator of this meme may search directly for keywords relating to that origin, so I'll put up that link: this came from here. (maybe)