On 2014-07-29, my first ever blogpost went online. That post is now a year old and I've written another post at least every week. Let me reflect on a year of blogging.
I started a blog to share interests, experiences and ideas, as well as to build a long term memory assistence tool. The sharing did happen and I do now have a collection of articles that I wrote some time in the past but these, in hindsight, are not the interesting parts of blogging.
Time
I thought I would save time by blogging. My reasoning was that I'd only have to write down my opinion on frequent subjects once and then I could give my opinion by referencing the post. That did not work out as expected. This solution looks like it scales very well (and it might!) but I don't have a big enough audience to make it worthwhile just yet. As a temporary conclusion I'd say blogging does not save time.
Writing
There's one objective I had before I started that I did make very good progress on: I wanted to write better. If I compare my first posts to my recent posts, I do seem to see a difference. To get more significant results though, I would have to get my articles reviewed by good writers.
Unexpected advantages
There are also some advantages to blogging that I did not expect at all. While writing, my own opinion often became clearer to myself than it was when I had it in my head. Explaining an opinion in text rather than in speech forces you to form a better founded opinion because it's a lot harder to use ambiguity in your favor when writing than when talking. This means that writing my opinion (and even more importantly: publishing my opinion) forced me to have really clear and valid arguments.
All in all, I'm very glad I started.