As I mentioned in a post last week, a new meme has been born.  This one is dedicated to discussing and sharing tip and tricks for blogging and using social media.  This can be from a personal or professional standpoint.  The intent is that through these posts by myself and, hopefully, others will provide some insight into how to succeed in these areas.  For lack of a better name, the posts should all be tagged with #meme15.

The topic this month is blogging and the questions to answer are:

• Why did I start blogging?
• Why do I currently blog?

Why Did I Start Blogging?

I first started blogging about 8 years ago.  The reason behind when I first started was a fairly cheap and selfish reason.  I wanted a place that I could store links, code, and similar information that I would discover either at home or at work.  And while doing this, I didn’t want to have to lug around one of those expensive flash drives.

Back in those days, eight whole years ago, a flash drive actually cost more than a few dollars.  That was back in my single family income and two young kids days when the budget was often very tight.  The solution was to just throw the information up on a web page… the easiest being a site that I first had on blogger.com.

The posts back then were extremely short.  They might only include a URL pointing to an interesting article.  Others were raw code with no explanation.  It was mostly random and unexplained – but completely useful to myself.

When Did I Become A Blogger?

About five years ago, which would mean three years after I started blogging, I became what I consider to be a blogger.  In a general sense, I had been one before then because I had the ability to write posts and people could look at my blurbs.  Things changed, though, when I started to want more than links and code on my blog.  I start to want to have content.

To me, having content is about writing something that can be consumed and used by people other than myself.  Sure, the links and code had always been useful, but they had no context.  When I started including that I was a blogger.

This change was a rather

Why Do I Currently Blog?

I continue to blog for a number of reasons:

• To Learn: Often, when I decide to blog about a topic it is because I don’t know enough about the topic that I want to learn more.  A great example of this is my Can You Dig It? – Plan Cache Series and Index Black Ops Series.  When I write these posts, it’s all about figuring out what makes these subjects tick and documenting what I find.
• To State What I Know: Other times, there are technologies that I’ve worked with for a while, such as SSIS.  I know how the tools and technologies work but I haven’t sat down and said, “use it this way, because…”.  That’s was the point when I wrote 31 Days of SSIS.  I‘ve used SSIS since 2005 and know what I’m doing.  I blog in these areas to put a stake in the ground to explain to myself why I use things the way that I do – does it still make sense when there isn’t a project deadline to do use the technology in that manner.
• For Credibility: I’m a consultant.  Being a consultant means that I am often expected to have an answer at the tip of my tongue.  But we can’t all know everything at any given moment.  We can fix this some, though, by having a resource written by ourselves that customers can be pointed to.  It’s especially useful, when you need to solve a customers issue and have a blog post from a couple years back that has the answer.  This kind of reasoning is exactly why I wrote the post Troubleshooting Permission Issues with CREDITIALS.
• To Share: Of course, there is no way I can get out of saying that I do this to share what I know with people.  I’m a firm believer that one of the ways that I can learn more is to try and raise the bar on what everyone else knows.  By sharing, I am forced to learn news things to stay competitive.  It’s a vicious cycle, and I love it.

Please let me know what you think.  If what I write is helpful to you, I would enjoy hearing about that.