I’ve just stumbled upon Andrew Sullivan’s essay “Why I Blog,” and it is brilliant. The prolific blogger that he is (previously at The Atlantic, now with The Daily Beast), this was a joy to read:

The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more. And, as Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.

Furthermore, Sullivan explains how blogging is participatory:

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

Perhaps my favorite one liner from Sullivan’s piece is this: “A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.” What I post here, for example, I want others to know/learn as well. On at least a half dozen occasions, I have searched through my archives (or via the search box on the right) to find something I linked to that was worth mentioning in a dinner conversation or a friendly dispute with a coworker.

Finally, Andrew’s metaphor for a blogger is spot-on:

There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music. He is both artist and producer—and the beat always goes on.

The whole piece is a must-read.

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(via Alexis Madrigal)