Blogging about blogging

Despite the flashy headline, not enough tech people are blogging.

Some are.  Those that are blogging usually write posts that fall into one of four categories:

1. elaborate posts describing how they set up a process, or solved an engineering problem, from beginning to end;
2. brief descriptions of something someone else wrote about, and a link;
3. a collection of URLs (links of the week); or,
4. things non-techie related, or at least outside their main discipline.

There are, of course, some other posts (and entire sites full of posts) that don’t fall into these four buckets.  Two that stand out to me, and that I don’t really qualify as “blog posts” at all:

• One is where another site simply slurps your RSS feed, regurgitating your excerpt and linking to the full article on your site.  This is kind of in category 2 above, but it is all automated… the person typically does not proactively say, “Hey, this blog post was really cool; I’m going to publicize it!”  They’re usually using software that merely attempts to mimic that functionality, and of course there is no commentary provided along with the link.

• Another category is quite similar, but instead of showing an excerpt and providing a link, they simply copy the entire article, without permission, and perhaps don’t even provide proper attribution to the original author.  I call this theft.  So does Brent Ozar.  And so does WikiPedia. It sounds ludicrous, but many sites are doing this – in the SQL Server realm, it seems every week there is a new site out there that is aggregating a lot of the more popular SQL Server bloggers, simply to drive traffic (and therefore ad revenue) to their own site.  This keeps readers from visiting the original authors’ sites, where the people who did the actual work might benefit (never mind that if they make updates or spark dialog on their own sites, the aggregators are typically not going to update their own stolen content). Now, keep in mind, some bloggers intentionally do this — they syndicate their posts on multiple sites (including some where the site owners charge for access).  I pointed out one such case to a colleague recently and, while he didn’t confirm to me that it was the case, I can only assume by his lack of response that it was intentional, or at least that he was already aware of the issue.

But back to the point of my post: not enough tech people are blogging.  And I’m not sure why.

Let me qualify my statement, because it is rather subjective.  There are plenty of technical people blogging.  The problem is that they’re not all blogging quality content, or at least not all of the time.  There are some bloggers out there, who I know personally, who are quite gifted and could share a lot of their technical knowledge to the benefit of many of us.  But they blog about things like what they’re having for dinner, a commercial they just saw on NBC, or how many songs they now have in their iTunes library.  And then there are others in that same boat who aren’t blogging at all.  For obvious reasons I don’t want to call anyone out directly, but let’s just say it’s a common observation.

A lot of people are afraid to blog because they feel they are just using the technology, and don’t feel they have much to offer that isn’t already covered in the documentation or in someone else’s blog.  I beg to differ.  It’s perfectly fine to regurgitate documentation or to expand on someone else’s writing.  As long as you are not performing huge Copy + Paste jobs, you will be adding your own spin to the content… maybe sparking ideas for how the product or technology could be improved, how your readers could make better use of what’s already there, or your experience with the technology that falls outside of what might be explained in the documentation.  Even if you just have links to sites with further details, by posting about them you are improving their discoverability.  And maybe just the way you interpret the documentation and write about it in your writing style will help people better understand the topic or reinforce what they interpreted on their own.

For example, imagine the following blog post about advanced memory management in SQL Server didn’t exist, and you needed to find out allof this information on your own.  Imagine how many different searches of MSDN/TechNet you’d have to exercise before you could assemble it all?  And still it wouldn’t necessarily be explained in the right way, because the documentation for extremely advanced topics such as this are usually (and sometimes necessarily) cryptic:

Fun with Locked Pages, AWE, Task Manager, and the Working Set…

Another example is a recent blog post I wrote.  I created a stored procedure that would assist with dynamic memory management in a multi-node cluster failover scenario.  There is nothing genius or revolutionary about the code that I wrote, but now if someone is searching for a way to do this, they can borrow from my blog post instead of re-inventing the wheel and writing the code from scratch:

Managing Active/Active cluster failovers with different hardware

So why aren’t you blogging? 

Are you nervous?  Are you not sure where to start?  Brent Ozar has some great posts on blogging, including a 5-part series describing ways you can blog better.  Need more inspiration than that?  Dustin Marx had a great write-up a couple of weekends ago, explaining his thoughts on why more tech people should blog.  I recently touched on some similar points also, over on sqlblog.com.

So again, why aren’t you blogging? 

Jump in.  Write about the things you know about.  Write about things you’ve tried, whether or not you were successful.  But for the sake of all of our sanity, please don’t blog that you are microwaving a Swanson chicken dinner, or that you just got back from the busy mall.  Save those little tidbits for your Twitter or Facebook status updates.