Why do you keep a weblog? The question keeps popping up in all weblogging forums from time to time. This is probably the closest to my reason for starting to weblog. RandomNotes started off as a placeholder for my links, reflections and thoughts. However, over the last 5 months it has become become a drafting board for various ideas that I am working on, a place to keep my hiking logs, the place where I like to fiddle with markup languages. Nevertheless, Cory has best described the motivation for keeping a weblog for me. When I am looking for a specific link, I often search my weblog rather than my bookmarks.

Incidentally, I noticed that weblogs are increasingly becoming a platform for activism or evangelism. And I don't mean the warblogs. The best and the most recent example of evangelism is that of Mark Pilgrim (and some others) for the adoption of RSS auto discovery by the weblog community. Zeldman's championing of web standards is another example of good evangelism (though that did grate on some people!). He got the ears of even people like me who are outside of the web design community. Googlebombing as activism has been gathering a lot of momentum. I do have reservations about googlebombing. In spite of most googlebomb's essentially good intent, it is vigilante justice of the kind that I can't somehow identify with.

Collectively, the weblogging community seem to have attained the kind of critical mass that makes meaningful change possible.

On a different note, John Hiler listed some of the large media companies that have jumped into the blogging bandwagon. It's an impressive list.