Marc Andreessen looks back at his first five weeks of blogging, with some interesting thoughts:
“…writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.”
“I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).”
He takes this a step further to understand how writers can increasingly look to blogging as a sustainable career:
” There are now a meaningful number of bloggers making a reasonable, even great, living by blogging, in some cases substantially more money than they would writing for a magazine or a book publisher.”
He also shares 6 ways that blogging is better than traditional publishing:
- “…blogging tolerates and even encourages stylistic idiosyncracies that traditional publishing would not accommodate.”
- “Incremental thinking is OK.”
- “Interactive feedback with readers is possible, even easy.”
- “Revisions in the face of new information are OK.”
- “Your weird writing style and flowery language is not necessarily held against you.”
- “…it’s much easier to link to other information or other people in blogs than it is in books or magazine articles.”