In an effort to spotlight what is slowly becoming a lost art (blogging), some of us in the PHP community have banded together today to talk about the active sharing of ideas and opinions that come with blog entries. Twitter (or Identi.ca!) ain’t got nothing on it. One-hundred and forty characters is nice, but there’s something to be said for a well-written or well-researched blog post. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve searched for a problem, usually the obtuse one that only seems to come up once in a blue moon, and find the answer on someone’s blog.

If you’re among those in the high business world, you’ve heard the cheesy term “knowledge transfer”. Yes, I cringe too even just to say it, but it gets the idea across. Blogging is so much more than vanity posts talking about funny things someone’s dog did. Writing up a blog post is an opportunity to take a small part of what’s in your head and share it with the rest of the world. It gives you an outlet, either creative or technical, to bring your message to the masses. This is the real key. When you blog, it’s not just about you anymore. You’ve taken a part of you, a sliver of your experience finding and fixing that bug or researching that old technology to write an API for it, and shared it with the world in a single click of a button.

It’s been done all through history – the passing down of knowledge from one generation (of programmers?) to another – and there’s no reason to stop now. I hope you’ll join me in making March a true month of ideas. Slow down and take the time to write a blog post or two. It doesn’t have to be a work of art. It doesn’t even have to be very long – just a few sentences will do. Write about something you care about, some project you’re working on that you’re proud of or just about the general state of the PHP community. It’s your blog, you write what means the most to you.

“If you have knowledge, let others light their candle in it.” – Margaret Fuller