The benefits of blogging

Recently Jonathan Eisen from the Tree of Life blog posted a very interesting list of 10 benefits he's found from blogging. OK, so the benefits I may get from blogging may be very different to his, seeing that he's a professor at UC Davis, with a huge network, but still there are a few things I hope to get out of it.

Getting musings out of my head and into text form. 
Sometimes, you have an idea or a question which you can ponder about for a while, but you don't have the means to actually do anything about it. I find that writing it down helps to formulate the idea, and simply get it off my chest! My memory is terrible, so the blog is a useful diary of ideas that I could potentially forget. This also helps justify writing a blog that no-one reads!

Practicing science communication.
At the moment, I just don't know who (if anyone) my audience will be, so I'm not sure at what level I should be explaining the science that I blog about. But just thinking about these things, and how I could potentially do something that could be described as "outreach" to the non-academic community is an interesting thought experiment.

The prospect of someone stumbling across my blog and being interested in my research.
Just a nice thought! 

I imagine I'll have a better idea of what the benefits are as time goes on, and there could be some unexpected positives (and maybe negatives?!). I guess I'll update this list in a few months after I've blogged a bit longer, and about different things. Live blogging conferences may be particularly fun and useful, so I'm looking forward to giving that a try.