The Value of Blogging

I sit in a local diner, thinking about the value of blogging and why I should write a post. My egg sandwich gets a little cold but my excellent potatoes are still hot. I should focus on the sunny atmosphere, the sandwich and my cup of coffee but I am a product of 2026 and so I think about content and value. I do put my phone down eventually to enjoy my breakfast and think.

Writing is thinking and so the value I get from my blog is mainly that I think. I think and write, write and think. I can easily write 1000 words here; I've always been verbose and enjoy language. Writing is aspirational - writing a book is a huge human endeavor - as well but mainly I can think more clearly when I write so I do.

I had a job where I updated Jira issues, sometimes very extensively. Jira is a bug tracking platform for the IT world for those who don't know. Anyway, every Jira issue is updated every time a developer works on the bug. My updates were long and detailed. Some people really didn't like that, they didn't want to read a "wall of text". Honestly, I thought those people were idiots. Or at least had the attention span of gnats. Sure that's harsh but I didn't care, I put a lot of work into those updates knowing that because we didn't have a lot of capacity the next time someone would work on that bug might be 6 months later. Future me or future someone would need context. But alas, some didn't value that context. They didn't understand that for me thinking was writing and that programming is reading and understanding context as much or more than writing code. More than that each long update was a demonstration of thoughtfulness, something that was generally lacking on the team. To be fair I understand reasonable people can differ on this. Brevity is the soul of wit and I guess issue tracking. On the other hand, while I'm certainly no Hemingway, I'd personally rather write more detail and read more detail that be left wondering what a I've e sentence summary was actually summarizing 6 months later.

Inevitably AI has already impacted issue tracking software and of course development in general. More importantly it has much broader implications in sense making and context making in general, which is basically at the crux of all AI anxiety. Letting AI loose to summarize, document and create sense for you, for society, sure can work but at what cost?

Doing a bit of research this morning on the value of blogging led me to this post from 2006: https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/how-much-is-a-blog-post-worth-would-you-believe-2400-dollars-each/

It's an interesting snapshot of the early blogging era, even before monetization was really a thing. It's worth a read and I wonder how much of it still applies 20 years later. That was an era when blog content was exploding, podcasts existed but only as an extreme niche and of course all content was human made. Generative software was for art projects and maybe some gaming applications. Things are obviously so very different now and we may be on the other side of the monetization wave. That blogger is still going strong by the way, here's an interesting piece on AI that is an unexpected take:

https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2026/03/why-im-not-joining-the-anti-ai-outrage-party/

Take from that what you will but I appreciate the idea of positively engaging with a new era. Sure this guy has a lifestyle brand/workshop series and other resources. He may not be seeing his livelihood slaughtered by AI slop but I think he's got some valuable nuance.

According to the 2006 article, this blog post is worth the time it took to write in very tangible, real dollars. We'll see. This is hosted on Leaflet so hopefully they get something out of it though there are no ads to be seen. Regardless, 2006 or 2026, I've written, I've practiced thinking and I've partially spoiled my breakfast but I think it was worth it.