Why are there posts on this site? It is because I truly believe that there is value to communicating and sharing knowledge.
This was reinforced after reading a recent post on Gamasutra, about League of Legends developer Riot Games:
Interestingly, says Merrill, all company employee can participate on the forums directly — which is definitely not policy for many developers or publishers.
“We don’t know if anyone else does that,” says Merrill. “It’s because we think it’s valuable to humanize the developers, and have a direct relationship, and personalize some things, and have this dialogue.”
I touched on this when talking about the power of Alec Saunders publicly posting his email address, but I have no idea why more developers don’t take this approach. Posting here has only resulted in positive things for me.
I can comment only for myself of course, but maintaining a blog takes significant time, not to mention that you need to work for its popularity. I see more value at posting on public forums and it is imho less time consuming. Twitter is also a viable alternative for sharing data, ideas, etc. at least it takes no time to type 160 chars :)
Posting on public forums and being active on Twitter certainly counts the same. I think that you need to be engaged with the community in some way or another.
As for the blog’s popularity, I wouldn’t worry about that. This blog has very few people reading it, but they tend to be all the right people.