What's the big deal about Blogging?

Amit Verma's latest yahoo column albeit the incongruousness of that question, has some well written points (and I am not even in the "beta" version to talk about this):

"1. Blogging captures the moment. One of the most attractive things about blogging to a mainstream journalist is that it has immediacy, and is not a slave to news cycles. A newspaper journalist, if he sees something today, will find it published tomorrow. A blogger can put it out there within five minutes, and it can be read (and linked) around the world in ten. Today, when everyone's using Twitter and newspapers handle their websites much better, this doesn't seem like a big deal. But when I was travelling through coastal Tamil Nadu in 2004-05, in the aftermath of the tsunami, it was huge. 
(And most importantly it captures our the emotions of the moment and helps some much in self-reflection)

2. Blogging sharpens your craft as a writer. When you write a blog with one eye on building a readership, you cannot bullshit. At a functional level, your writing has to be spot on. Your readers have countless other things they could be doing with their lives, and hazaar links to click on if you bore them. You cannot be self-indulgent, and your prose cannot be flabby or long-winded.

When you write regularly for such readers, your writing is bound to improve. I wrote an average of five posts a day for the first few years of my blogging -- my frequency has dipped alarmingly since, alas -- and have probably written more than 8000 posts across blogs and platforms. That kind of practice is bound to have an impact on your writing. Many of my early posts make me cringe today, and I've clearly improved hugely as a writer. And as I keep writing, hopefully I will keep improving. (Also see: Give Me 10,000 Hours.) 
(I don't even want to talk about this now, this is a very obvious. I can't even muster up enough courage yet to read my older posts)

13. Blogging expands your world. From a reader's perspective, the sheer variety of content that blogging enables introduces one to ideas and content we may not otherwise have come across otherwise. There's a lot of such content out there, and over time we find out own filters to navigate this content. Thanks to blogs, I've learned much more about the world than I otherwise would have."
(Ever since I started blogging, it has made me live and feel that famous quote from Newton - "To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”)