Better Posts Through Reading
There are a LOT of people that are blogging from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference this week. I've been reading several of the feeds (thanks to Newsgator) this week and am learning a lot. But what's sinking in most, is not all the cool things that are being discussed at PDC, but rather what I like and don't like about blogs. I'll admit to being pretty new to the topic. I'd heard of blogs before, but never paid much attention to them until I was given the opportunity here to be an author. But now that I are one, I'm noticing some big differences in quality between bloggers.
There are hundreds of posts that are coming in from the PDC, and I wade through them primarily based on subject line. So the first lesson is to make the subject line appealing, or at least indicative of the subject of the post. I'm probably reading only about a third of the posts that come in. But of the ones that I do read, I find that many of them are barely worth the effort. So many of these contain barely more than what they said in the subject line. Or they give a quote from the speaker they heard, but don't give any context or even comment on whether and why the author agrees or disagrees with the speaker. Don't get me wrong here. I'm not meaning to be critical of anyone in particular, and I won't hold any individual up for ridicule. However, I will say that Werner Vogel's post about Making Users Feel Good was one of the better ones I've read coming out of the PDC. I have had a dozen posts come through about this same subject, but only this one really explained what the basis of the talk was.
So why do I care? Because, in case you hadn't heard it yet, I am going to the PASS Community Summit in Seattle, and I'll be blogging on some of my experiences there. Prior to reading some of these PDC blogs, I might have made some of the same mistakes that I'm seeing here. But now that I'm getting more exposure to different authors and their styles, I will hopefully do a better job. So let me encourage you, if you're also a blogger, to get more exposure to different authors and find what style you like best. Then mix in your personality and make it your own. As for me, I'll be more verbose than many, so don't expect hourly updates from the PASS Summit. In fact I also plan to spend time making contacts and renewing acquaintances while I'm there, so you may not get anything until the end of the day or the end of the week. Maybe that doesn't fit your style, but now you know mine.