This entry is a bit of meta-blogging - blogging about blogging. I try to avoid doing this, but blogging is an "industry" in serious need of a reality check, and while I'm hardly in a position to do so, I can at least take a nibble at the toes of it.

Why I Blog

Firstly, to avoid the seeming hypocrisy of me criticizing blogs in a blog entry, I should answer the simple question why do I blog?

The easiest answer is that it's an on-the-record (e.g. searchable) archive of thoughts and technical explanations that I think are valuable (not to all people, but rather to some people, some of the time). Under my control and ownership, I am publishing thoughts and opinions for worldwide consumption. Not that everyone in the world - or even the tiniest percentage of it - is going to want to consume it, but it is accessible to most of the world. It beats posting thoughts on random discussion boards, to be edited or censored beyond my control, and for someone else's benefit.

Right now, for instance, with a relatively middling pagerank, Google is sending about 100 people a day from around the world here for their search terms (usually technical searches), followed far behind by a dogfight between Yahoo and MSN. I get a feeling of satisfaction knowing that I've (hopefully) helped people, whether it's implementing hierarchies in SQL Server, understanding the benefits of the new functionality of SourceSafe 2005, filter EXIF from their images or understand what value GPS will add to our digital photography, building Firefox extensions, or converting color schemes. On top of that, about 20x more get here daily via RSS readers, links, or bookmarks. More still have accessibility to these thoughts via aggregators.

Knowing that some people can get value from some of the entries is very satisfying to me. Most of the people will skim past and move on, but some will get genuine use out of it.

I also blog for reputation. To a small degree I am laying out who I am on here. I think I've demonstrated that I'm a fairly smart guy, with a lot of experience and a pragmatic perspective, and I have a given set of beliefs and perceptions. I've never attempted to pander to anyone: I've alternately offended both the pro-Linux and pro-Microsoft crowds, as well as the open-source and commercial software vendors: I am not a mouthpiece of someone's dogma, and while sometimes my opinion and perspective coincides, it doesn't indicate any alignment.

A lot of the people who I (along with associates and subcontractors) consult for (consulting on SQL Server, software architecture, Biztalk, Sharepoint, outsource software auditing, and custom software development in the Greater Toronto Area) - the real revenue generating side of yafla - view these pages, and it has been very beneficial.

Additionally (and most importantly to me) I am laying the communications groundwork for a product (Product X). I'm not into pushing vapour so I won't say anymore, but that is largely the selfish reason why I've sought PageRank and readers.

So that's why I blog. The fact that these are sequential, time-based entries is largely irrelevant (which is why I removed the time on the entries - it doesn't matter if I put this up at 1:32pm or 2:27pm) - ultimately it's just a convenient content management system with a usable delivery mechanism (RSS).

The Blogging World

Which brings me to blogging in general. <1% of the blog world, I would say, are interface blogs - they're information conduits - a one-way interface - between a business or project (or even celebrity) to consumers. Want to know what's up with SVG in Mozilla? Just read http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/tor/. If you want to know what's up with Web Services @Apache, just  visit http://ws.apache.org/blog/.

There are similar blogs for most software groups and technologies these days.

These sorts of blogs - often faceless blogs with little personality - can be tremendously valuable in keeping customers up to date on a project or product's happenings. They can even be internally beneficial in corporations as project or team façades. For instance "Project Life Admin Overhaul Project" with frequently added status updates: An on-the-record, historically-traceable, centralized location for information dissemination. This could be a Sharepoint site as easily as it could be a bonafide blog, but the purpose and value is exactly the same. The goal is usually to limit the scope to the product or project (no personal chatter about team lunch get togethers or funny cat incidents), and when something pops up the reader knows that it impacts the product.

Eventually as Project X is publicized here, a separate project blog will be created that contains nothing but product news. No pictures of my car rides, meta-blog comments, or random technical commentary.

Of the remaining 99% of blogs, a significant percentage are personal blogs that really aren't intended for anyone other than family members and close friends (and even they only visit when they're guilted into doing so. "Hey Tom...did you see my latest blog entry?").

The remainder is filled up with opinion blogs (blogs largely patronized by people who already drank the kool-aid, and they're just going there to surround themselves with like-minded far-Right or far-Left minded individuals): These blogs are vastly less influential than they are generally imagined to be, as their readership is already stuffed with the converted. The only people reading an Open Source Evangelism blog, for instance, are open source advocates. Joe VP isn't wandering in there when deciding what to base the next platform on.

The Meta-Bloggers

I left out one rather large group, which is bloggers that blog about blogging and bloggers - the meta-bloggers. This is a very, very large group of individuals. See Robert Scoble, strangely one of the most popular bloggers out there (something which I attribute to a "first mover advantage" - Robert was associated with some of the people who basically invented the concept of blogging, so he started getting the links early. Now that he's entrenched, and virtually no one really bothers linking anymore, he remains "powerful" among the blogging about blogging community). 90% of his blog is filled with either links to random stuff that other people are saying (there is very little original content in the blog world it sadly seems. It's easier to say "someone says..." than it is to actually say yourself. For every actual piece of content posted, there are probably 100 "someone said" blog entries), or talk about blogging.

If you look at his adoring community, and follow some of the backlinks, you discover a large, incestuous network of bloggers that are blogging about blogging, and linking to each others blog entries about blog entries about blog entries that talk about blogging about blogging on blogging with blogging. You even get people warning about blog "celebrities", like Scoble, releasing too much personal information. "As public interest in blogging grows, he can only get more famous." the blogger writes.

Give me a break. Bloggers are just so full of themselves.

While Scoble is surrounded by pro-Microsoft sycophants begging for a job at Microsoft, and has an adoring community of please-link-to-me advocates (9 times out of 10 you'll find the same incestuous link between Scoble and the sites he links to. Oh boy, I sure hope Scoble links here!), most of the world just doesn't care. Scoble's appeal is extraordinarily limited, and the idea of him being a celebrity among anyone other than a core group of Microsoft groupies and blog evangelists (the latter is a declining group - it really isn't an innovation anymore. The former will exist as long as there are people desperate to work for Microsoft) is delusional.

I commented in my notes regarding Microsoft's Launch 2005 event that one of the presenters asked who in the audience read the TechNet Canada blogs, and this was just another example of bloggers getting full of themselves. Of course they didn't - the audience reaction was almost entirely negative. Why would they? Why would some corporate developer trying to fight with SQL Server to solve a deadlock issue sit reading the blogs of a Canadian Microsoft technology evangelists (basically glorified salespeople)?

The idea is ludicrous, but there was that expectation, just as there's the flawed perception that the majority of people are eagerly and anxiously consuming blogs every day. It's a complete disconnect with reality, because people are grossly over-estimating the impact of blogs.

And this is the crux of blogging - It is a domain that has some definite uses, but in some ways it's a pyramid scheme: The illusion of the rising impact of bloggers is really just the blog community eating itself - selling itself to itself - all desperately tracking each other to lazily gain content for the next entry. "So and so said....here's my off the cuff take on that".

Sort of like this entry. Chomp!