Rich Burridge's Blog : Weblog

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Thursday June 28, 2007

Personal Answers To Some Blogging Questions

About three weeks ago, I wrote some Blogging tips for new bloggers to help members of the Usability group within my part of Sun, who are considering starting a blog.

Today I had a con-call with some of that team. They had some good followup questions. As I think these may be of interest to others, especially if they are thinking about starting a blog, I'm posting them here, along with my personal answers. We actually expounded on each one a lot more in the con-call, but the answers here are the ones I'd written down before the meeting started.

As I said, these are my personal views. Other bloggers will no doubt have different answers.

Q. When you write, who do you imagine is sitting on the other side of the screen? Who is your audience?
A. Me. I look at it differently. I blog about things I'm interested in or passionate about and I try to write about it in such a way, so that if it was somebody else who had written it, then I would have read it completely and been entertained by it.
Q. How do you decide when to take comments, when to respond, and when to close comments?
A. I always take comments. I have it set to take comments for ten days for each post. I read each one. If somebody is spamming me, then I'll remove it. If somebody uses inappropriate language then I'll remove it. Otherwise it stays, and if it was a smart comment or somebody asked a good question, I'll try to respond (typically via another comment, but occasionally by a new post).
Q. What is the coolest thing you've ever put on your blog?
A. Define cool. Two got me in the physical newspapers.
- One on road kill. Sad but true.
- One on library book sales
My favorite post is the Calvin and Hobbes Life Instruction Manual
I think my most innovative one (and perhaps this is the coolest one) is finding out when your library has new books you are interested in
Q. What is the one (or more) thing that you really wish that you hadn't posted?
A. I don't think I've really had one of those. There have been several I wish I'd spent more time preparing. They felt rushed.
Q. Can a blog be successful without a name or face? What is your take on the more anonymous group blog?
A. I think a blog should have a name and a face to it. We are constantly told to write in "the natural voice". It's hard to empathize with somebody when their blog is anonymous.
Following on from that, I don't believe a group blog should be anonymous either. It should be a collection of people, each writing in their own natural voice.
Q. How much of your content is personal?
A lot.
Q. Do you draw a line between work and life postings?
A. No.
Q. Can a blog be successful without some of the life bits?
A. I'd say no, but it depends who's posting. Most of the stuff on Jonathan's blog is work related (the five things post being a notable exception). Of course, Jonathan has a very natural voice and it helps to be the CEO.
Q. Without using the first person?
There was a great blog, where the author was a dog. I loved that blog! It's the first person, but it's the dog that's speaking. This allowed the owner (who is unfortunately no longer with the company), to write in a unique style and express her viewpoints differently.
Q. What have you decided not to blog about?
A. Politics and religion.
Q. You have lots of categories of postings on your blog -- which categories do you write the most about, and which categories get the greatest amount of response?
A. Books, Links, Family, Humor, Computed Related, General and Hacking. are the ones I now use the most.
I'm not sure I can get target responses by category. It's usually by a particular post. I can't predict beforehand whether I'm likely to get a lot of comments though.
Q. Are there kinds of topics that you avoid? For example, do you intentionally invite or avoid controversy?
A. I don't normally avoid any specific topics (apart from politics and religion). When I want to gently point out something that I think Sun is doing wrong or could improve on, I more often or not point out somebody else who's doing it better, and let people draw their own conclusions. Hopefully there are also folks in management that are reading it too, and can act accordingly.
Here's an example.
Q. What else should we know that we haven't asked already?
A. There is an internal Sun blogging site which has the same setup as the external one. If you want to try out things, that's a good place to do it.
There is a good internal wiki for Sun blogging with an extensive FAQ. There are also several internal mailing lists that you can join.
I'd also suggest sticking with one of the existing standard Roller blog themes if you can. I customized mine and it makes switching back a lot harder.