oday is November 3rd, 2004. In case you didn’t know, this country held elections yesterday and as of this morning we have another four years of President Bush. One thing that I found interesting last night was that on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and other news stations the topic of bloggers came up time and time again. It seems blogging has had an enormous impact on the political process in this country.
For the technically savvy, blogging is probably no big deal. We have been doing similar things on bulletin boards, news groups, message boards, etc., for years. Technical discussion and discourse has been around a long time. I remember being involved in numerous discussions on Compuserve (ID 76244, 3116) many, many moons ago.
For the both technical and non technical users, what does blogging have to offer? In one word: REACH. Anyone with an Internet connection and a browser can begin broadcasting. You can become the equivalent of Tom Brokaw or Katie Couric with just a few clicks. But how do you attract eyeballs? I recently corresponded with one of the blogger elite, Robert Scoble. One statement to me was: be interesting. Your blog should be interesting for people to visit from time to time. One more idea I would add is to be frequent. If you want people to come back then you need to have new content. If CNN didn’t change their content every day, would you visit their site?
So here are a few of my favorite blogs:
Robert Scoble
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011
Robert is a Microsoft Evangelist who blogs about geek dinners, tablet PCs, Channel 9, and other interesting topics.
MSDN Blogs
http://blogs.msdn.com/
This is the site where Microsoft employees blog. Lots of good technical content can be found on this blog.
Office Zealot
http://www.officezealot.com/BlogHome.aspx
A lot of Office exerts blog on this site. This is a great site if you use SharePoint or other Microsoft Office tools.
Julia Lerman
http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog
Julia is becoming an expert on Web services, Tablet-PCs, and other related topics.
Bruce Schneier
http://www.schneier.com/blog/
Bruce is a recognized expert on subjects like cryptography and security.
Rick Strahl
http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/
Rick is an all around Internet and .NET expert.
Miguel de Icaza
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/activity-log.php
Miguel works at Novell and is a leader in the Mono project. Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET Framework tools.
Chris Sells
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/
Chris is another Microsoft blogger who puts on a great XML conference.
As you can see, there are some pretty cool blogs for you to explore. Hopefully this list contains some useful places for you to look for technical information.
