I don’t think that blogging is one of “my things”
What is a blog to you? To me a blog since 2005, has been a personal place to keep my code and bookmarks, was great place to keep the bugs and workarounds of problem found while developing and working on code. Most important a place to save links to great articles that I may need later. Most of the time, I found myself searching on my blog for the article need to fix specific problems or to fill a need like creating a PDF in C#.
After the kids go to bed, I check my RSS reader for interesting articles, normally coming from Scott Guthrie or other big techie for new technologies to play with. If I’m going to use it in the future, I’ll just add a link with a short description, so I can search in my blog when need it. Also my blog gives me a timeline of what I was doing that month, great to check what I was into it.
Lately, this last 6 months, I have been interested in “the art of blogging”; instead of just a place holder to keep your “data” People are using it more for different reasons than mine. If mine was a reason for anybody to keep a blog.
These are the different types of blogs that I read:
1) Articles about code: You’ll find out there the geeks and nerds that write code just for fun on their free time, lots of great articles with code attach that you’ll need eventually. Most of them now write complete articles describing the technology showing at that time.
2) News and opinions: A new product has been release, let’s copy and paste a link about it with a short description. Yes I do that too, but my blog is not read that much, so those posts are just for me really. This great links are need, when you are ready to download the new version of the Orcas Beta 732.
3) The fine art of blogging: These are the blogs and more and more I read the most and I find myself thinking, would be great to be able to write as good as this people? But I do know my limitations, I hardly comment my code, let alone write something so lengthy as these people like Chris Garret or Robert Scoble
So the latest classification of bloggers, are the one that more and more are getting my attention, I’m enjoying those articles and enjoying the way the write them. More than one person/blogger said already this, but I find myself reading blogs more than reading the paper. Blogs are faster and better to the market than the papers, even the internet paper is. One day, CNN.com will be just running Community Server and each reported will have a blog where you can just subscribe to the blog roll. Great digest if you ask me. News will be more interactive to the reporter as you’ll be able to leave comments and feedback. Wouldn’t be great to ask the reported on the news: “Hey, tell me more about the reaction of that politician when you ask him this or that”?
I see the future of blogging a bright one when old technologies jump into the wagon, yes maybe I’m late realizing that, as many of you already knew since blogging started. There is only one part about blogging that still does not seem right. The comments section should be more a thread based comments than a list, as many times I would like to reply to a comment left for somebody else about their opinion on the post. The tag game becomes very difficult. Also the trackbacks/comments should be able to download by subject and see all posts that came from one particular post.
Cheers
Al