Blogreading your way around the Blog-o-Sphere you find lots and lots of bloggers who have received
Guru Status one way or the other. There's nothing wrong with that; even more: when someone is very educated in the programming languages I like, and is able to talk about it in an interesting and convincing way (like those good people in my last sentence, giving me more insight in the language and programming in general, (s)he's subscribed! But sometimes I wonder if it's only the G33ks and Guru's who are blogging. I mean, G33ks, Guru's and me. I'm by no means one of them. For starters I haven't built something big like one of the
big blogging engines. Or even smaller things like small
Open Source applications to be shared with the world. The only thing I'm doing is building internal applications to keep my employer happy (and improving my Software Engineering and programming knowledge in my free time). This is nothing earth shattering, tens of thousands of other developers must exist all around the globe in pursuing the same happiness.
Of course I understand some of the rationale behind all this: it's a bit like district-based elections:
winner takes all principle. People with already some influence tend to attract more and more people, leading to the famous
Shirky's Power Law, the curve with only a couple of class-A bloggers with 10,000+ visitors a day high up to the left of the graph, and the bulk of smaller cannon fodder (joke) somewhere in the margin to the far right .
The ones who started on a fortunate moment in time, e.g. a couple years ago during the dot com boom, or the ones with above average writing skills, or with a strong opinion, a good PR talk, or maybe just enough courage are in the top charts. And me? I'm only some small blogger from the Netherlands. My fluency in English is not enough, I do not have enough experience, credibility, I never built something big etc. etc. I wonder what can be done about it:
At least being sincere in blogging efforts: 4 or 5 posts a week must be possible; but time and time again I find myself doing all kind of other things like reading other blogs, doing volunteering work for my church, raising a kid, etc. It seems keeping my own blog updated with some interesting rants is not my first priority. On the other hand: don't see this as an apology for not blogging enough. too much people are excusing their way around, a bit too often to be credible, for the lack of recent posts. Most of the times reasons seem to be related to
1) having too much work / project = late or
2) they have another life too. And well, why shouldn't they? All bloggers give away their content for free, so there's nothing they should apologize for (except for their good name and fame maybe).
So, to conclude this small piece: I do try to blog more, but don't expect an apology when it doesn't work out. I have a life too :)
And yes: I don't life in a box, so I did notice
Tech Ed US Edition started today (well, as a matter of fact actually yesterday). But, I'm going to the European edition , starting June 28, so see this also as a note in advance for probably no updates in that week, as I won't be wireless there...
(cat.: Bloggers, Opinion)
