Ideas of March

Chris Shiflett (as always) knows how to generate a good debate. The current one is about blogging, the man says: “we need a blog revival”. And he is right.

I will try to resume the already short and very explanatory post of Chris: since most conversation moved to Twitter and it’s more active than blogs ever were, we are having fewer debates. Then he ask for you to write a blog post with the “Ideas of March” title, sharing your thoughts about the subject and sharing it on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.

Personally I think the blogosphere is more active than ever, mainly with blogs that cover local and politics news: the last presidential election in Brazil had great examples of people giving opinions and exposing facts that the traditional media outlets were not covering. However I do think the tech people are becoming less and less active in the blogosphere. Well, at least at mine Google Reader feed stream full of PHP-related blogs.

Dohms have some thoughts that I much appreciate in her Ideas of March post: it’s important professionaly. Matthew got right to the point I most like: knowledge sharing.

To sum up, the list:

• Voice: it’s you and the author. The reading is more pleasant this way;
• Expressiveness: even when not updated regularly, you can understand better the way the author thinks;
• History: where are that command or code snipeet that I used in 2007?

History is important, but I value more voice and expressiveness. I don’t think it’s easy to write: to me, good writing it’s an art. And it’s because of this I really appreciate the blogs of Dries Buytaert and Fabien Potencier. Both are leaders in their open source projects (Drupal and Symfony, respectively) and both know how to write. They are the perfect example of voice and expressiveness to me.

Working again with a broader range of web projects at Infranology, I will commit to share more about our findings and experiments, from Symfony to Hadoop. The giants commited to blog more. I will commit to finally blog. Promises, promises?