Asked a reader,
"There are many, many academic bloggers out there feverishly blogging about their areas of interest. Still, there are many, many more academics who don't. So, why do you blog ..."
As I've noted before, I blog because it makes me feel like a ten-foot diamond on a Christmas tree. To me, blogging doesn't really follow from being an academic. Both my academic work and the blogging I do in my spare time follow from a common cause: I just wanna have fun. I make no effort to cover global archaeology news in my blog, and I'm far from comprehensive even on Scandy archaeology news: I write about whatever catches my interest. People kindly send me links to pertinent news items, and I pick some of them up, but I'm pretty sure this blog would be a lot more boring if I started writing out of a sense of duty.
So though a ScienceBlogger, I'm not really a a science blogger. Rather, I'm a blogger who is fortunate enough to be a scientist, which has made it possible for him to sneak onto ScienceBlogs.com.
"... and how does blogging help with your research?"
Mainly as a source of motivation, by giving me a sense that someone more than myself cares about the somewhat abstruse questions and themes I address in my work. Also, there may be a beneficial minor-celebrity effect, in that a lot of Scandy archaeologists know who I am through the blog, and that this possibly makes it easier in many small ways for me to get my work done.
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I blog to stay sane in this crazy world. A safety vent, a hand across empty space, a call in the wild.
A way to connect.
I'm a bit like that too, can't really decide on one subject; trying to make my blog look like a magazine i'd like to subscribe to.
Yes, I often explain to those not in the know that my blog is an amateur magazine, not a public diary. It makes people much more interested in having a look.