Is this time of the year? My favorite blogs!
Every year Iike to post my favourite blogs so I can compare what did it change in my life and what I was doing.Did Iimprove in my taste? I am in the opinion that the blogs you read, is what you are trying to accomplish. The are reasons why you read a blog and why do you keep reading. While you reading this post, I'll be on vacation in the Cayman Islands, I'll be back next week.
The top of my list this year is Scott Guthrie blog. This year not he just improved his blog by including very detailed tutorials, he also blogs 5 time per week. His detailed tutorials has help me to get up to speed with AJAX, C# 3.0 and Silverlight. He also provides every presentation, source code that he publishes in his blog to anybody to use. I don't see much desktop development on his blog, looks like ASP.NET is the technology he likes the most, in my personal opinion. He is very approachable by email ;-) and he lived in England like me, he never answered what part of England, is not the same to be living in London or Leeds ;-) Also he is the most read blog on weblogs.asp.net, more than my blog believe it or not.
Scott Hanselman will be my second pick this year, was my second pick last year as well. I do not know if he deserves my second spot, as everybody knows my list every year is considered the Oscars of bloging. Every winner will received an sticker and a plastic pen. Scott this year blog quite a lot about the iPhone, anyway he would not get one, then he turned around and purchased one. I thought that I was the only person to be against iPhone because I do not have the WAF (Wife's Acceptance Factor) and not good justification for spending all that money for a phone. At any rate I do enjoy reading his blog and he is very intelligent blogger the way he mixes; products opinions with tech posts, code, personal posting including his travel, son and above all getting awareness for diabetes. He makes it interesting and personal, would like to copy learn more his style. He also has a podcast that most of the time I have to say, gets a little boring. Noneless his blog is a source of knowledge and will get better as he just started a job at Microsoft and to demonstrate how small the geek world is, his boss is Scott Guthrie.
In third position is Robert Scoble, droping from the first position. Not because he is not as interesting as before, the reason is that Scott Guthrie has now a 5 start blog now. I wonder who started blogging first? I started reading Guthrie on 2004 and Scoble on 2005. Bacause Robert moved blogs I do not know his content before that. Anybody knows? Scoble was the reason why I started blogging on 2005 and I did also moved blogs in 2006. I wished I kept my old posts. Now when I move blogs and providers, I do keep my posts and I try to stay with Community Server so makes moving easier as you own your database. In any case, Robert is a great writter that should spend more time keeping his blog with better content than just news, still he still keeps me up to date on the tech world. He is also, and always will be in my list until I drop him, because he always answers my phone calls and emails. He should post some more personal post like he did before from keeping people from mistaking his blog with techmeme.
Fourth position this year is Rob Howard. Not just a great blogger, but a great blog creator. I got to say that his blog was not very interesting this year, he kept posting news about Community Server, but I still remember his great blog when he was writing forums.asp.net that became the best forum software out there. Then he got the best blog software and created Community Server. I would like to thank again Telligent for providing me with this software for so many years. I am looking forward for his tech posts again.
On Firth and last is Woody Pewitt as he is the Developer Evangelist of Southern California & Hawaii. His blog is full of SoCal events for developers like me. He also does a great job keeping the MVPs in SoCal informed. So if you believe he gets the award because I am trying to kiss some *** here, you may be without any doubt slightly correct. Doesn't mean his blog does not deserve it.
This year even the list is short is compact with knowledge and great writing, something you rarely will find here.
Cheers
Al