The purpose of travel blogging

I have been thinking about the purpose of blogging. I like the idea that daily writing, or any creative process for that matter, is an integral part of forming the thoughts and opinions. In other words, you don’t actually know what you really think about a particular topic until you capture your thoughts in writing. A similar concept applies to capturing visual impressions in photos, paintings, etc.

Incidentally, sometimes we can formulate opinions and understanding by “talking them out” instead. I heard that Hemingway used to do this with his books. Here lies a bit of danger: unless you are as good as Hemingway, talking about your creative ideas might actually prevent you from writing about them (or painting them or doing the photo shoot). It can happen because talking does serve the purpose of fleshing out the ideas, but it is much easier than creating something persistent and tangible, like a pice of writing or an object of visual art. I believe this is why Seth Godin’s advice to writes is to keep their mouths shut about their book ideas until they actually have the books published and thus ready to be discussed.

Also, blogging is different from journalling, because the latter is private (and has a unique usefulness precisely because of that), while the former offers a way to practice expressing the ideas publicly.

Then, there might be an inherent usefulness of blogs to the audience, beyond mere entertainment. For example, yesterday, I was thrilled to discover that one of the first web publications I have read when I was a graduate student (which, given my age relative to the age of the Internet, makes it one of the first web publications, period), Philip Greenspun’s “Travels with Samantha” is still online and, as far as I remember, is in it’s original format. This is a travel blog/photo blog that was written before either of these terms existed. In retrospect, reading it, as well as photo.net, which was Greenspun’s personal website at the time (and the format and the content of which has changed significantly over the years), was a significant experience for me..

The mere fact that I still remember “Travels of Samantha” after all these years means that it must have had some effect on me. The rudimentary early ideas of mobile computing, my interest in hardware and gadgets, the interest in photography and my approach to it – they were shaped by Greenspun’s travel notes and photos. All these connections were completely hidden from me at the time.

Perhaps this blog might also turn out to be useful for someone in some mysterious way.