In today's blog, Why I blog more than write scientific papers Lilia Efimova of Mathemagenic addresses her motivation to write papers versus her motivation to blog.

Because I get timely and so-needed feedback on my ideas.

It's also something to do with my intrinsic motivation to write and to get feedback rather than formal performance appraisal thing - "published so many papers". Probably if I become well-known and widely published scientist I will enjoy writing papers more. But not now :)

[Mathemagenic]

For me, however, her earlier entry allows the reader to expand on the feedback idea, namely

I need a conversation to grow my ideas, to be more specific I need a deep reflective conversation for it. In this conversation context means a lot, especially knowing why someone comments in a specific way. In academic writings you can trace it a bit with references, in informal coffee-table discussions you trace it with your knowledge about person's background and work. So, guess what is my problem with most of on-line discussions? I find it difficult to learn about context.

Some of on-line discussions are perfect for "going in and out", getting feedback on a small question (e.g. BRINT), but I want more. Other discussions, usually more private and often closed are better for reflective conversations, but in this case there is a "newcomer" problem: if you join in the middle of the discussion it takes a lot to recreate the context and to be able to join in (then I say - I don't have time for it).

So, I choose blogging. It gives me nonintrusive access to people I don't know personally. Blogs gives a better feeling of their authors thinking and reasoning than discussion boards. Probably those "distributed conversations" in blogs are not so easy to overview, but given a combination of RSS, news aggregator, referrer logs, Technorati and other tools it's not so difficult to trace it. And, bonus! as it's so difficult to overview many bloggers tend to summarise it - one thing which is not easy to get in on-line discussions.

I would like to say [given that I'm now writing more than ever before and given that the triggering of the new behavior is my having a weblog] that I'm coming from a very similar place.

The knowledge-making-in-conversation motivation is, at least for me, partly immediacy and partly that my corresponent is giving my thought an individualized response. These features allow me access to an in-depth reflection (literally-a reflection as from a kindly distorting mirror) of my thought .

After initial struggle/adjustment to my own 'distorted' ideas and the ideas and intents of my partner-in-thought, I can better formulate my resultant thoughts and by this means am better able to fine-tune what I next say.

This sort of writing feels more productive than sending off a draft to a journal and, thus, is more satisfying. The sense of productivity is conversational and relational and part of my hard wiring, I suspect.

If this is a generic knowledge-making reality I'm describing, rather than my own quirkiness, then

the quick turnaround and

message-specific[even person-specific?]fine-tuning

of responses in knowledge-making via weblogs will have big, positive effects. For example:

a) We may get some people involved in the global effort, those who wouldn't be drawn-into knowledge-making via published papers.

b) Higher turnaround speed for knowledge-making may well accelerate the generation of worthy ideas.

There's lots more to think about here. For example, the idea of context that Lilia has named is deeper than the social, interpersonal context I referred to above. The kind of contextual analysis she describes could allow the really good respondent to find the intended idea even when only partially expressed in the message itself. Hmmmm!!!