A decade of blogging

A decade ago today I posted Mass-market scholarly communication to start this blog. Now, 459 posts later I would like to thank everyone who has read and especially those who have commented on it.

Blogging is useful to me for several reasons:

• It forces me to think through issues.
• It prevents me forgetting what I thought when I thought through an issue.
• Its a much more effective way to communicate with others in the same field than publishing papers.
• Since I'm not climbing the academic ladder there's not much incentive for me to publish papers anyway, although I have published quite a few since I started LOCKSS.
• I've given quite a few talks too. Since I started posting the text of a talk with links to the sources it has become clear that it is much more useful to readers than posting the slides.
• I use the comments as a handy way to record relevant links, and why I thought they were relevant.

There weren't  a lot of posts until in 2011 I started to target one post a week. I thought it would be hard to come up with enough topics, but pretty soon afterwards half-completed or note-form drafts started accumulating. My posting rate has accelerated smoothly since, and most weeks now get two posts. Despite this, I have more drafts lying around than ever.