There’s a review on The New Republic’s website about Sara Boxer’s book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web. I haven’t read the book, but the review contains a funny description of blogging:
Acoustically, it evokes both a burp and a yawn, seeming to anticipate the toss-away, fervent, carefree prose it would come to define. One doesn’t craft a blog, just as one doesn’t plan to puke. One pukes. One blogs.
Them’s fightin’ words! While humorous, I don’t think it’s true: anyone who’s blogged for any length of time—and saying this I just now realized my personal blog is almost five years old!—knows it’s actually a lot of work to stick with it and most bloggers agonize a lot over what they post.
There is some truth to what he says though though: if you think too much about a blog post, it will likely never be posted, at least in my experience. But then again, I think the same is true of academic publishing—it’s tempting to workshop an article to death for years until it’s just perfect, but you won’t publish very often with that attitude. I wouldn’t compare academic publishing to puking though.