If there’s one thing more tedious than blogging about blogging, it’s blogging about lack of blogging. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about the importance of blogs and the importance of sharing ideas and debate with follow designers and developers in a permanent, referable way.

Since last year’s Ideas of March post (in which, lest we forget, I committed to, ahem, blog more) I’ve posted just three times. But those are three substantial, mainly technical posts, which not only would I have not been able to express in any meaningful way on Twitter, but that have been useful for referring back to frequently since they were written.

A blog post, of course, offers the freedom to say as much or as little as the subject requires, and crucially, it’s available to refer back to and for others to find in the future. You can’t really do that with Twitter. All ideas and opinions are widely spread for those there in the moment, but are almost impossible to find and reconstruct after the fact. In 2009 I started archiving my tweets, but even so, I’d missed the first 10,000, and there’s no hope of tracing any conversations.

Often, I can’t find something I know I tweeted the day before. Conversely, as an example, here’s the post from 2003 when Dave announced the CSS Zen Garden, which took me roughly 30 seconds to find. Or Dan’s entire Simple Quiz archive, equally so. Everything I’ve posted to this blog since 2003 (most of it fairly throw-away) is still available as it was and where it was the day it was posted.

Permanence and findability are important for ideas to spread and grow. Twitter is a fragile and fleeting place. Give your ideas and thoughts the permanent home they deserve. Here’s how you can join in the blog revival:

• Write a post called Ideas of March.
• List some of the reasons you like blogs.
• Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
• Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.

Will you join us?