Why have a personal blog now that AI is here?

Now that everyone is moving over to use AI chat for their search needs, why have a blog? Are people going to read the blog?

Well, I have a few reasons why I decided to restart my personal blog at this time.

1. I want to become a better writer and get into the habit of writing and publishing.
2. I want to publish more opinions which can then be picked up by these AI search engines.
3. I want to learn in public.

I want to write & publish

The first reason is pretty straightforward. I want to write more, I really enjoy writing and I missed publishing stuff on the internet. I made my first internet dollar by creating a blog back in 2009.

Writing online has a lot of benefits other than just being served on search engines - it increases your luck surface area and allows other people to discover you too. I want to make use of that.

Personal opinions still matter

The second reason is something I found when I started searching for opinions from personal blogs through ChatGPT. Kind of a meta example, but when I was thinking of writing on my blog again, I searched on ChatGPT using o3 and specifically looked for opinions on starting a personal blog. I wanted to know what other people thought.

People will always care about what other people think. It’s one of the reasons why people stopped trusting Google results in the first place. People got tired of seeing overly SEO optimized articles instead of real opinions about the topic.

Learn in public

The third reason is because I want to learn in public. It's a concept I learned from SWYX and I really resonated with that. It takes the pressure off from trying to come up with new content and it also helps me learn better. When I try to write something down, I see the gaps in my understanding, so I learn more about it, and can write about it better.

I want to look back later and see how far I have come. I want to see what I was interested in.

I think everyone should start a personal blog, even if they're already posting on social media. A personal blog on a domain you own has more longevity than any social media post.