blogs and journalists...
Mark refering Tim Bray's conclusion about blogging not being dangerous for your job is asking "why go read a journalist's article about something when you can get it straight from the horse's mouth (or blog)?".
Well, first I don't pretend to be a writer (unlike Mark who is our lead Technical Writer for Directory Server and who did a wonderful job with some of the programming guide) and clearly it takes me some effort to lay down my ideas on paper or a blog. I usually end up throwing raw technical material, with a little background and short conclusion rather then a compeling story with illustrations, anecdots... not mentioning style.
My wife being a journalist, I perfectly understand the difference between an expert talking it's mastered subjects and a writer expressing someone else expertise for a targeted audience. Writers and journalist have the skills and practices to adapt their article to different audiences, depending on the values that need to be passed on, while engineers tend to go for the details that they find "cool".
As a result, I believe that we will still need people to write about what we do for different audiences, as I will keep on relying on Mark's skills to describe what our products is doing.
Well, first I don't pretend to be a writer (unlike Mark who is our lead Technical Writer for Directory Server and who did a wonderful job with some of the programming guide) and clearly it takes me some effort to lay down my ideas on paper or a blog. I usually end up throwing raw technical material, with a little background and short conclusion rather then a compeling story with illustrations, anecdots... not mentioning style.
My wife being a journalist, I perfectly understand the difference between an expert talking it's mastered subjects and a writer expressing someone else expertise for a targeted audience. Writers and journalist have the skills and practices to adapt their article to different audiences, depending on the values that need to be passed on, while engineers tend to go for the details that they find "cool".
As a result, I believe that we will still need people to write about what we do for different audiences, as I will keep on relying on Mark's skills to describe what our products is doing.
Posted by GerwingR on March 11, 2005 at 05:43 AM CET #