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The ‘Oy’ of Blogging


By Andrew Binstock
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December 1, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Sturgeon’s Law in its common formulation states that “90% of everything is crud.” This observation especially applies to the blogosphere. And here I am not referring to content alone (where the 90 percent figure seems rather conservative), but also to the underlying technology. But I’ll start with content.

You can quickly come to 90 percent of content if you add up the self-absorbed blogs of tweens, teens and college kids; the hate blogs; and, of course, the many, many abandoned blogs. Of the remaining 10 percent, you then eliminate topics that don’t interest you. You now are way under 1 percent—yet you have literally hundreds of blogs to choose from. If software development is your thing, you’ll want to skim off the blogs by engineers or CEOs who are shills for their companies; those who evangelize their pet technology; and most especially, those who are always attacking or condemning some person, some company or some technology. Finally, you’re in the clear, with the handful of truly useful blogs.

You then must accept that most of these blogs are only intermittently maintained. Many have frequent entries apologizing for not having posted in weeks. Eliminate these, if you will, and you have the true short list of active, intelligent blogs on your favorite topic. Try as I might, I can’t expand my list to more than 15 blogs whose new posts I read right away. Of these, exactly two make all the searching worthwhile: Jon Udell’s “Jon’s Radio” and Larry O’Brien’s “Knowing .NET.” What distinguishes them is the frequency of posts, their consistent quality and especially a personal intimacy. These bloggers share their pain, their quest for solutions and the answers they find. Time spent with them is never unrewarded. All of which makes me very skeptical when I go to blogs that sport dozens, even hundreds, of links in the blogroll panel. To admire so many blogs suggests a lack of discrimination.




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