"Some people are genuinely uninterested in writing things that people want to read – as an example try reading some Hegel."
I squirted my coffee on this one. He does practice what he preaches, i.e. has a unique and memorable voice.
My take is: good writing and unique voice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful blog. Without these, you won't get much readership other than Google directs (maybe). But no amount of cool writing will get your Advanced Algorithms blog read if it doesn't have useful and interesting informational nuggets.
The problem, as I see it, that a lot of people face trying to write a technical blog is how to divide up what they're explaining into digestible chunks (size dependent on audience, Terence Tao's blog chunk size will be different than your high school math blog's) and present them intermingled with good language. In effect, the language (unique voice, anecdotes, etc.) is the carrier and the chunks is the information and the audience dictates the channel capacity.
I squirted my coffee on this one. He does practice what he preaches, i.e. has a unique and memorable voice.
My take is: good writing and unique voice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful blog. Without these, you won't get much readership other than Google directs (maybe). But no amount of cool writing will get your Advanced Algorithms blog read if it doesn't have useful and interesting informational nuggets.
The problem, as I see it, that a lot of people face trying to write a technical blog is how to divide up what they're explaining into digestible chunks (size dependent on audience, Terence Tao's blog chunk size will be different than your high school math blog's) and present them intermingled with good language. In effect, the language (unique voice, anecdotes, etc.) is the carrier and the chunks is the information and the audience dictates the channel capacity.