To me the most interesting effect of your blog is educational — when I read it I feel like I’m getting a painless lesson in advanced statistics. Any idea if it affects many other readers that way?
It’s nice to hear this, but it’s probably like the difference between watching baseball and playing it. A reader feels he or she is getting an education by reading the blog, but you really learn by doing. On the other hand, you (and many other readers) are active data analysts. So I suspect that you’re really learning from your own data analysis. But the blog could be helpful because you go back and forth–something on the blog can inspire you to try something, which then motivates a question which is answered on the blog, etc.
In any case, I certainly help the people for whom I directly answer questions. Years ago I decided it was less effort to answer people’s questions than to say No. (This was back when strangers would email me after reading Bayesian Data Analysis with questions about nonconverging Gibbs samplers and the like.) Anyway, if I’m answering a question anyway, I might as well do it on the blog.
One thing I’ve tried to avoid is the lazy pattern of answering the easy questions and ducking the hard ones. I notice this on some computer bulletin boards (for example, R-help): There are some people who pounce on any easy question that comes up (often to tell people to Read the Manual). But when you ask a hard question, you get responses from a different sort of person. That’s who I want to be. If it takes too much effort to be helpful in this way, I’d rather not try at all.
Part 1 of this interview.