Kent

http://haacked.com/archive/2006/03/06/BeyondChannel9.aspxGreat slide from Mark Pilgrim's ETech Presentation:

How to Become an Expert:

1. Write code
2. Make mistakes
3. Get yelled at
4. Fix your code
5. Write about what you learned in step 4

I've been intentionally silent (including one stealth public-ish thing I do daily) on Microsoft's latest forays into viral marketing. Personally, I saw too many episodes of it internally ("Hey - we're launching this great new site, could you blog about it?") to really care, or search around to find out what Origami is/was/will be. Still, I recognize it as a valuable tool to market a product, and despite the bad taste people have for marketing, advertising and related activities, they are essential. I've often said of Microsoft (although it's true anywhere), "If you're not actively coding, you're in marketing." This blog is marketing (for me, currently -- and doing a bad job, I know). MSDN is marketing (yes, even the online docs). Of course, advertising is also marketing. Filthy lucre it may be, but without it, we'd all be "coding for food". Let's all say it (until you believe it): "Advertisements are not evil, they may be boring or irritating, but I accept they must be there." They make people aware of the stuff we build, so we get paid and go buy stuff other people have built (that we found out about through some marketing channel).

OK, that was heading down a babble channel. Let's start again and be more specific to the Origami project. I can see the internal email now: "We're launching theorigamiproject.com for a new project. If you have a blog, please mention it." The few hundred bloggers internally try to hit http://origami and other possible internal pages to find it. Maybe they do, I don't know (I am not on that blessed network anymore). Either way, a few dozen do post about it. People hit their sites, and look themselves. Repeat until it snowballs. I have no problem with it, or people linking to it (OK, I'll come clean, this entire babble was brought to mind when I saw that Phil Haack got grief for blogging about on10.net). Is it any different if I suggest that I think this video is brilliant? Or if I link to a particularly funny Dilbert? Or if I mentioned just a few of the great developers I know? (too lazy to put all those links in, but assume I did).