SerialSebBlogging, How and Why : Metablogging
My eyes are feeling better, I’ll be back working tomorrow, and will finally put an end to a month of on and off development that is one of the most frustrating experience I went through in my 5 years or so of professional life.
I’m still wondering about my blogging style. I guess I feel the same symptoms as Chris Brumme, I just start blogging and the flow of words just doesn’t stop, and my posts end up being very long. Or if I try to do it short, a la Scoble, I have a strong feeling that it’s absolutely uninteresting, boring, and polluting my feed.
Why is this post named Metablogging? Because it’s blogging about blogging. This kind of blogs further provoke new kind of blog entires, which are fundamentally blogging about blogging about blogging. Blogging is fundamentally recursive, and this would give any normal people headaches. Bloggers are not normal people. Nor are developers. If you find any developer responding to the common definition of normality, chances are you’re facing someone who doesn’t really like development.
While blogging about blogging, you become even more egocentric than when you just blog in the blogosphere, as you’re thinking that your dear readers, which you don’t know and with which, as such, you don’t share much at these early stages of a blogging experience, would be interested in the questions you’re asking yourself about how to sell them your product, your thinking. Thinking about it, we’re really doing some reverse marketing, asking our customers, hey, why don’t you tell me what would make you read my blog, talk about it endlessly, and promote me at a near god level. Interesting to see that some people out there are quite successful at getting people to answer.
Interestingly enough, I have a lot of readers. To be exact, about 240. You are obviously one of them. The fact is, I absolutely don’t know why you’re reading this blog, and I really don’t know why you’ve subscribed. Tonight, I tried to read the material available here, and tried to see why anyone would be interesting. From my own findings (and you are more than welcome to comment on my blog…), I would have subscribed to my own blog in an expectation mode, that is, seems interesting, no real content yet, but he’s just starting, so stay tuned, it might become interesting. But I, as the author of this blog, didn’t expect anyone to read me. When I had my blogspot or my erablog set up (yes, this is my third attempt at being interesting and getting love), I didn’t know who was reading my blogs. Oh, I also never had any comments in both blogs, ever. I didn’t feel any responsibility. Now that I know 240 of you are actually reading this blog, I’m under pressure to stay interesting enough for you not to unsubscribe yet, until I release content so worthwhile that I will not ever need to worry anymore. I also think that in any reasonable scheme, this never happens. You have to put a lot of effort in staying consistent if you don’t want to be unsubscribed. If you don’t want to be the next IBM. I don’t want to spend 20 years rebuilding what I lost just because of big misjudgement.
But how exactly can I know if things are indeed interesting to you? Comments are not enough for that obviously, as some long entries I try to write to be informative and interesting (like this one) don’t get any comments. People don’t comment unless they feel they can add something to the discussion, and when I present this kind of experience, I’m not really sure anyone would have anything to say about it. If you’re among the 3 people interested in that discussion, I’ll write the second part this week-end.
Another potential way to know that your content is interesting is trackbacks. I’ve been quite successful in my attempt at bootstrapping this blog by being present in the newsgroups, being scobleized once, and answering the eweek article. This gave me the biggest part of my readers (if you’re coming from somewhere else, please tell me!). But now again, the content itself is not the point, people got hooked for a single entry, and don’t necessarily find anything interesting in all the other posts.
I must say that trackbacks are frustrating, we’re in a very sophisticated IT world, and yet the trackback system just looks like an embryo of a technology. I have a project about it, but won’t be able to allocate any time to it before February… And I can’t wait for the whole world to switch to my software (although Clemens was quite successful at cannibalizing a whole community to switch to a new system he developed).
My point is (you’ll notice that in most of my entries, if you reed the first line and the last line, you get to the point quite fast), I lack form (I can’t scoble pieces of thoughts on the web just like that, it just doesn’t feel right), and I lack content (frankly the technical content I’ve been publishing is not good enough for me or for anyone for that matter). I’ll try my best in the next few weeks to start blogging more technical stuff, which should go with my first articles to be published since I wrote my unpublished book on peer2peer. Once again, a blog entry which should’ve stayed very small expanded to an unbearable length.
If you, dear reader, wants me to blog on very advanced stuff (understand, the lease system, plug-in architectures, marshalling across appdomains and their caveats, the IIS execution model, COM+, aspects, interception, script compilation, batch files, my blue eyes) just say so.
As a last line, I’m asking one person not to comment at all on this blog. Yes mom, that means you. But I have a special link for you, so you don’t go over all that stuff you don’t understand for nothing: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=655&topic=-1. Be aware, I might start applying some of these rules if you ever comment again on anything. You don’t know the pain to edit all my xml files to erase you from this digital life. I’m just an electric wave here, I am knowledge expressed as photons. I can’t afford any link to the physical limited world. (this is the part where I stop myself from increasing again the length of this entry with a rant about how it’s not normal that no one bought me a segway yet. I’m serious).