I'm really of two minds about the write for you/write for an audience argument. I started blogging early this year, and so far I've written and published four posts that don't make me want to gouge my eyes out. That's not to say that what I've written is especially good, just that it's passable. When I started I was shooting for one post a month, so I'm obviously way behind on what I thought was a conservative goal.

What surprises me most about the whole exercise is how overwhelmingly bad I am at writing. More than 80% of the content I've written has been thrown away. If I wrote code like this I'd have been out of work long ago, but I just can't bring myself to go on permanent record with half-baked poorly thought out blog posts.

I hate to put this so bluntly, but many people out there lack this kind of restraint. As a consequence, there's just a universe of truly awful writing online. The Joel Spolskys and Steve Yegges are really few and far between.

So yeah, write for you, but if you don't mind, could you do the world a service and write for the rest of us too? We'll all be better for it.