Blogging as an “ideas garden”

Mark Carrigan has a post “How blogging is different from tweeting“. I particularly loved his description of blogging as an “ideas garden”:

It occurred to me recently that I feel extremely differently about ‘outputs’ via Twitter than blogs. I first came across the notion of the ‘ideas garden’ via Doug Belshaw and it suggests a blog can be seen as a place where you help ideas take root and grow.

This contrasts with the inherently performative feel of Twitter where the focus on immediate feedback means that individual item becoming a focal point for your reflection. In other words I care about the reaction a tweet gets because it is self-standing and immediately public whereas a blog post is an element of a large whole. It is a contribution to growing my ideas garden, for my own later use and whatever enjoyment others find in it, rather than something I have expectations of receiving a reaction for.

The blog itself then comes to feel like something more than the sum of its parts: a cumulative production over 13 years and 5000+ posts which captures my intellectual development in a way more granular and authentic than anything I could manage by myself. Over time I see old posts I’d forgotten about resurfacing as people stumble across them and this long tail heightens my sense of the emergent whole. It’s become an ideas forest which people wander into from different directions, finding trails which I had long since forgotten about and inviting me to explore a now overgrown area to see if I should begin tending to it once more.

https://markcarrigan.net/2023/05/22/how-blogging-is-different-from-tweeting/

How blogging is different from tweeting

Other people I’ve seen do this really well:

• Dennis O’Keefe
• Simon Willison

I’m inspired to try do a bit more of my thinking publicly, particularly about my work in the software industry (both cutting code and leading people).