Facibus On Blogging

Paul Graham wrote the following in September 2004:

It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays. Magazines published few of them, and judged them less by what they said than who wrote them; a magazine might publish a story by an unknown writer if it was good enough, but if they published an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can’t say precisely because they’re insiders.

The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.

That is the bottom line: anyone can write and publish an essay on any topic that they choose. This is the power of blogging - nothing is to stop your writing being read by one other person, or one million.

Paul covers the history of the art of writing and how it fell out of fashion a while back - he suggested that democratic publishing via the internet would see a revival of the essay as an art form. I’m pretty sure it is happening now.

What’s in it for bloggers?
He also talks about the essay as exploratory writing - starting with a question and writing about it as a means of following the concept to its logical conclusion without necessarily having a set barrow to push. I think that this is the real WIIFM for bloggers - we come across a hundred questions a day that could be the basis for an in-depth post. The exploratory essay form allows us to fully develop the idea.

Thanks to Stilgherrian for the link.