Marc Canter: For those Dan Gillmor watchers out there - I think this may be the FIRST time Dan has included an image in one of his posts.

No, it's at least the second. I know because I was watching while he was posting it.

You'll get an idea you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. A business contact. A bug report. An old friend finds you. You get a job. You hire someone. You get an answer to a question. These are the benefits of running a weblog.

It's very true, every single item of this list happened to me at least once in the last year.

But blogging can also be hard.

First you need time. Unless you are "blogging only for yourself" or you want to post totally boring stuff, you need to spend some time every day thinking about what would interest your readers, doing some research and reading other people's blogs. I didn't post anything for a week here and I lost approximately half of my visitors (thanks to the few of you still here :-).

Weblogs are also the ultimate reputation building tool. It's true that hey tend to be authentic (as Phil Wolff said "I don't write to be authentic. I am authenitc when I'm writing.") it's still tricky to write on a weblog trying not to get flamed, not to piss off anybody, to be smart, accurate and correct, and possibly to get linked from somebody in order to get some additional visibility.

If you happen to get into troubles with some A-List blogger your life could become miserable because of the amount of traffic, visibility and attention they control (like it or not, this is how it works).

Being a social environment with possibly a very wide reach you need to be careful about how you use it.

Not everybody can or want to deal with all this, many people I like and respect have stopped blogging in the last year, I don't know why they did but it probably has something to do with the challanges above.

But anyway, if you have never tried you should absolutely open a weblog now, it's the most rewarding experience you can get on the web.