A wide range of motivations drive the creation and maintenance of weblogs (blogs). I'm using the term "blog" to generically refer to the content management system that many are using today (such as what you see here), even though it is quickly evolving away from the minute-by-minute "what I'm doing and what I'm listening to!" style that earned it so much deserved derision in the first place.

Sometimes someone really has something they want to gripe about, and a blog offers an easy and accessible soapbox to vent from. Brand X makes terrible cars, the waiter at the local Denny's was a jerk, or Walmart represents satan incarnate (or incorporate?). No one is forced to read it, and if search engines are polluted with these random rants, well that's a search engine problem and not a blogging problem. 

And why shouldn't they use this cathartic medium if it helps them get it off their chest? Even if their entries are only read by a couple of close friends or family, that is the original spirit of the internet materialized.

Other times a blog is a tool to promote yourself, or a product, in a way that one hopes to leverage into business or personal success (in new-speak: to monetize it somehow. Indeed, that's the case here - I have an exciting venture that I'm going to use as a source for content in here on occasion). Generally this sort of self-promotion blog gets the initial slingshot by capitalizing on some association with a famous event, product, or corporation, and leveraging that into (often unearned) authority in other realms. "Bob, the guy who worked on the install for Office 95, has written some thoughts about Microsoft's opposition to OpenDocument..."

It's become quite a proven formula, and examples abound.

I consider Joel Spolsky of Fogcreek Software a pioneer in using a blog for this sort of self-promotion, using the "authority" technique I mentioned previously, even though he was doing it before we called it blogging. He has used www.joelonsoftware.com to publish some fantastic essays of various levels of formality (which were even printed out in dead-tree form), doing so for quite a few years. He has taken the fact that for a brief period he worked on the automation engine for Microsoft Excel and parlayed it into attention and credibility for his business, and has gotten attention for his thoughts regarding virtually anything relating to Microsoft (in particular those things that could be interpreted as "anti-Microsoft". The minions love when Joel disparages Microsoft, because his tenuous association with Excel in the past makes him an authority figure on all things Microsoft).

Joel is a "best case" example of this technique, as he happens to be incredibly insightful and pragmatic, and is an excellent author as well.

The "Joel Fomula" - leveraging some industry connection or history to build awareness for some new venture - is growing in popularity as more are seeing this as a critical strategy. Everyone who had anything to do with any well known (or infamous) product, however remote their role, is coming out to give their take on some current situation (and a cynic would say that they're "karma whoring" - they're saying exactly what the populace wants to hear, throwing sand in the eyes of their old masters if it helps get them mentioned on Slashdot).

This is becoming so formulaic that I'm getting a bit cynical about it all. Oh look, the former `Director of Product Marketing for Apple's "Pro" applications' has given the world his thoughts about digital rights management (all 271 words). Zzzzzzz.

Expect more somehow-connected-at-some-point people to pander to the populace as they try for their piece of the Bubble 2.0 action. They'll tell us how everyone should get along, Microsoft is evil, all IP should be free, and so on. It's a proven equation.