A coworker of mine just started blogging and in his first post he said something that made me think:
And I must admit, the thought of showing of my knowledge to the world through the same means - a blog - has crossed my mind more than once.
And that probably captures the motivation behind the majority of all tech related blogs: showing off our knowledge. Showing people how smart and great we all are. Who doesn't like to come off smart to his/her peers? Of course, most of us will tell you that we're only interested in sharing or spreading knowledge. And there's definitely a lot of truth to that. But don't let us fool you... it surely isn't the only reason we're blogging about our technical adventures. The other reason is simply Intellectual Vanity. We think we have interesting stuff to say, or interesting content to share, so we do it. And we hope people like it and learn from it. And i'll bet most of us hope people will think we're good at what we do because of it. It makes us feel good when people say "i liked that stuff you wrote on subject X" or "those examples really helped me out, thx!".
To me, there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of great stuff is being produced and shared because of this and a lot of people are learning from it. That's always a good thing. Some people take it too far though. There are some tech bloggers that don't really produce anything meaningful or original. Some of them are just recycling material from other bloggers or are just rephrasing press announcements from large software vendors they have an affinity for. Some of them are just praising whatever new technology comes out without actually giving it a critical look. Don't get me wrong, we don't need to critize everything new that comes out but we should be honest about those new technologies. So why do these people even have a blog? Probably the same Intellectual Vanity that drives the good blogs and the meaningful content. Some people are only doing it for the name recognition i suppose...
A certain developer who used to work on a large project where i worked is a good example of this. He was pretty much worthless as a developer, yet from reading his blog you could get the impression that he's an expert at what he does. Yes, he's involved in the 'community' and is no doubt working hard on his career. He easily impresses people with simple demos of new technology and is making a good name for himself with the kind of people who are easily impressed by fancy 'hello world' applications. But he has about a snowball's chance in hell to become a productive member of a real development team in 'real-life' projects. These are the kind of people who really shouldn't be blogging about technical stuff.
So what kind of blog posts do i like? The ones that are original. The ones that take a complex or relatively unknown subject and make it clear to those of us who didn't know about said subject before. The ones that provide workarounds for obscure bugs we eventually all run into. The ones that offer good advice on how to solve problems we all face. The ones that discuss what doesn't work. The ones that discuss what does work. The ones that show us how to do something. I could go on for a while but i think it's best to summarize it as follows: the ones that provide valuable information for us to learn. There are a lot of great tech blogs out there that are filled with this stuff. I often have a hard time just to keep up with all the great stuff that gets posted.
So you're probably wondering why i'm posting this. After all, it doesn't really fit into any of the categories i just mentioned. Well except that technically it is 'original' since i just wrote this stuff... Anyways, these are just some thoughts about tech blogs that i wanted to share. Maybe some people feel the same way about it 