Why blog?

Why should we blog?
Maybe I should rephrase: Is there a reason not to blog?
If you do not already know what a blog is. Check out this short intro:

I started blogging this January as part of the course  "IKT og læring". All assignments where completed in blog format and you can find the blog here.  Blogging gave me a lot of motivation, forced me to reflect and matured my thoughts.  These few months of blogging have been an eye opener and I only wish I had started earlier.......

My goal now is to recruit as many Q2S PhD students as possible to start writing their own PhD research blogs.
Why is this at all useful?

For one: Writing promotes writing!
As a PhD student you focus mostly on "presentation writing". By this I mean  professional scientific papers that will appear in Journals or presented at Conferences. However, there is a very very long path from when you start thinking about the paper to final paper submission. What happens in between?

There is a lot of thinking, for sure,.....
Some of the thinking you might want to keep for your self and within a small circle, however a lot of the thinking can be very general. In fact I think MOST of your thinking can be publicly expressed. 

And it does not have to be directly related to your paper writing.
Perhaps you have some thoughts about what not to do when you travel. Perhaps you have some thoughts that keep you motivated and that help you get through the difficult days at work. Perhaps you have some interesting thoughts about the strange behavior of Norwegians that you would like to reflect upon.
Did you meet some interesting people at a conference? Did you attend some interesting talk. Did you read an interesting paper you would like to discuss and reflect upon? Was the paper accepted or not? There are several themes both directly related to your research or related to being a PhD student that can be extremely informative and motivational for other PhD students.
But be smart!

The paper is rejected and you write: 

" The reviewers must have been high on crack. A bunch of illiterate idiots that do not even understand English. Blind review my ## . The telyChat Conference  must be open only for a close group of friends... A bunch of losers..."

Is NOT SMART. Even if you really think it is true.

Blog is writing in a more INFORMAL "thinking writing".  By writing in this form you will in fact improve your own professional writing.  Others can come with feedback but even without any feedback you are forced to reflect and construct opinion about your own work.  If you are able to CONNECT and NETWORK with others this will be an invaluable bonus.

Blogging is a great tool for reflection, information and learning. As a PhD student you will find yourself stuck for days without any production and blogging can help you out. Writing every day will mature your thinking and help clearing your voice.  Blogging will improve your vocabulary and your professional communication skills.  It will give you more confidence and at the end it will help you in your final writing.

Blogging is MOTIVATIONAL and your thoughts can reach out to a large and broad audience. Blogging is becoming highly acceptable in the research community! This may convince you more.


Do you think blogging can be useful? Why? Why not?
How transparent should your research be?
How much do you think can be revealed in a blog? Can you release little information of your research in pieces as a series of posts that anyone in the world can give feedback to?
What will this do to the end result?
Transparent research is maybe for the future, but 
I challenge you to reflect on these question in your own  blog-post and link back to this blog post.

This post is based on my prezi presentation "why blog".