At any point in time I always have 20 or more blog post drafts stored in MarsEdit. Whenever I get an idea for something I want to blog about, I try to write it down. But then, for whatever reason, I decide not to post it right away. This may be because it was an underdeveloped idea, one that I feel I have to think more about before I actually post it. Or it may be that I get interrupted by something, and just forget about the whole thing before I go through my drafts folder again.
Once in a while I try to go through the drafts and delete or write them up properly. The problem is always how much time I should spend on writing and polishing the blog posts before publishing them. In general, I try not to spend too much time on blog posts, as I see them as small ideas that I want to share with the world quickly, or reminders to myself or others. More developed and complex ideas go into publications.
I see that people have very different strategies when it comes to this. Some spend a lot of time writing long posts, embedding pictures and videos, and proofreading properly. Others post short and quick notes about all sorts of things.
For really short things I have started to like Twitter quite a lot. It is the perfect medium for one-sentence long thoughts or links to interesting things. But for more paragraph-sized ideas I still like the blog format, and a somewhat quick and rough writing process. The rest of the time I have to spend on writing papers, since the Norwegian research system evaluates you on the number of “research points” you have generated over the last year.
[This blog post is an example of something which I am not really sure is interesting to the world or not. But, since I already spent a few minutes writing it, I take the chance of publishing it anyway. ]