S'more blogging benefits

Ron Sillimans lists 15 ways blogging has benefitted him. The first item is a benefit that I've often noted:

I’ve been able to sharpen some vague thinking into much clearer concepts.

The idea of the blog as a place to sharpen ideas goes against the commonplace thinking of nonbloggers (like that Chronicle guy from a few weeks back), perhaps because a person really needs to blog in order to experience that effect. It isn't as if every day I post a sharp blog (far from it), but it is the case that the conversations that erupt and the return to ideas and the potential of an audience (even if I'm that audience) that blogging provides do serve to make me think in ways that I wouldn't if I were only thinking in my head.

But the reason I want to link to and save Silliman's list is because he isn't a specialist in comp/rhet and he isn't an academic (though he's certainly a remarkable scholar--not to mention, of course, a poet). But many of the items in his list are the same benefits many of us in rhet/comp would note. Not the most startling discovery, but one to keep in my hat, in case I need it someday.