Kent

When I first saw that Alex was moving his blog off of blogs.msdn.com, I was thinking of posting my own rationalle, but decided against it as I was sour on blogging. Then Brian mentioned that he had similar reasons as Alex, so I decided I had to comment.

I first started blogging on my "old company site". It was a home-grown solution. Pretty cheesy, what Eric Sink calls a "MeWare" solution. I stopped that after a stinging side comment from Scott Swigart ("Writing a blog solution is the .NET equivalent of 'Hello World'", or something like that) and moved on to DotNetWeblogs. I loved that little community Scott started, and despite the usual content fire storms, many others did as well. As all of you no doubt know, DotNetWeblogs became weblogs.asp.net (and I vainly think I had some small part to play in that), which begat blogs.msdn.com. I left blogs.msdn.com in what was described as a 'hissy fit' as that was a URL change I hated and did not want. I had wanted to stay on weblogs, but due to a policy change that didn't affect everyone (but that I couldn't get reversed for me), I was stuck. Therefore, I left, coming here.

Our "community" has grown at least five and a half big community blogging sites that I know of: Weblogs, MSDN (and Technet) blogs, GeeksWithBlogs, DotNetJunkies and CodeBetter. Each is essentially the same, and each has -- or will -- go through the same pains as any other semi-cohesive group. Flame wars and battles over, "Is this appropriate" are inevitable in any human discourse, especially asynchronous ones like blogs. As I monitor the main feeds of most of the above, I see all sorts of posts that led Alex and Brian to feel they needed to self-censure themselves and leave. I also see what may be hugely interesting posts, but in languages I can't read. Neither the off-topic posts, nor the non-English posts bug me 1% as much as the waves of, "Oh, look at the latest 'viral' site that Microsoft has created" or "Hey, look at this new software that has come out." posts. Some are still interesting. For example, I would never begrudge Phil's soccer posts -- they just show he's a person with more than one interest, and that makes him more human/interesting.

I guess where I wanted to head with this post is, "A blogging community should be just that -- a community. While no one should go overboard and post endlessly about alternate topics, they should be able to post on things that interest them without the community coming down on them." That's what categories are for -- to limit your 'noise'. Also, give people some slack. They found it interesting, so perhaps someone else might find the same point interesting, even if it's not about "Creating an obfuscated ASP.NET "Atlas" component for recompiling IL into WPF applications."

On the LazyWeb front -- that's a feature I'd love to see in a blogging engine -- "Show me all the posts, except ones in this category."