Blog as Intellectual Craftsmanship

Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your blogs and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The blog also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot “keep your hand in” if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the blog, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression.…

But how is this blog – which so far must seem to you more like a curious sort of “literary” journal – used in intellectual production? The maintenance of such a blog is intellectual production. It is a continually growing store of facts and ideas, from the most vague to the most finished. … I do not know the full social conditions of the best intellectual workmanship, but certainly surrounding oneself by a circle of people who will listen and talk – and at times they have to be imaginary characters – is one of them.

That's C. Wright Mills, after Kieran Healy did a find and replace of "diary" with "blog." There's more to the excerpt, and Kieran's whole post is worth a read as well.