In the age of huge content curators (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon) what good is blogging anymore? Today I read this great column by Cory Doctorow, where he describes how blogging has helped his writing career.

In the post, he also makes an analogy that really reverberated with me: the word “blogging”, originally a portmanteau of web + logging, brings together the idea of daily logs of ship captains, with the discoveries that one makes as they go through the internet. So a web log — a blog, becomes the place where you write your day to day discoveries and insights from surfing the web.

This idea has a strong relationship with “active reading”, where you actively reflect and build upon the media you consume, instead of passively letting the ideas wash over you and fly away, leaving nothing behind but an impression of an idea. It is a way to make content consumption healthier for your brain, and to exercise your neurons, something I wrote about before as burning your mental fat.

I guess this text resonated with me a lot because blogging has also been a part of my life for a long time. As time passes, though, it has meant different things to me over time. Recently, I’ve been kinda trying to do livestreaming as well, a bit as a way to build a healthier relationship with my gaming too. That is still in its embryonic stages, but I think the ideas in Cory’s text: blogging as a way to think about what you consume, and build a library of ideas and reflections, also applies. (I just with there was a way to do live streaming that did not leave me beholden to Google or Amazon…)