Comment by Christian

July 22, 2008 @ 2:03 pm

Hi Kevin,

Great food for thought. As such an expert in SQL Server you have a vast knowledge base, so some of the nuggets that you have and can share quickly without too much thought may have a large impact on your readership. So I would go for quantity right now, and then scale it back if your readership asks for less (but I can’t see that happening :)).

Thanks for contributing here. Great stuff!

Christian

Comment by Brent Ozar

July 23, 2008 @ 6:07 am

What I like about microblogs like Twitter is that they’re more of a conversation than traditional blogging.

We’re in a shift from publication to conversation. The shift has gone like this:
- Books
- Magazines
- Blogs
- Microblogs (Twitter, Identi.ca, etc)

People get less and less information from books because the time-to-market is so long and because there’s zero conversational element in it. Magazines fared a little better with their letter-to-the-editor stuff, but they’re not thriving either.

Blogs are much faster interaction, but like you’re seeing, there’s still a lot of editorial in it. Plus, blog comments are locked in a silo, not part of a conversation. I’m leaving this comment here, but it’s not really tied into my online identity. There’s nowhere people can go to see this nugget of info tied to my online identity - it’s just hanging out there, lost in the chatter.

Microblogs are as fast as you can get to realtime conversation with strangers, all tied to your identity. While the level of time & effort to “polish” the content goes down, the level of time & effort required to maintain the conversation goes up. The sweet spot for domain experts appears to be a mix of time blogging and microblogging. I could spend all of my time microblogging, but then I wouldn’t get anything done.

Ideally, I’d love to see my blog comments encapsulated in Twitter, so that they’re tied to my identity, visible as part of my thought train, but we’re not there yet.

Anyway, yeah, long story short, do a spell check then post. Blog ‘em if you got ‘em.

Comment by KKline

July 29, 2008 @ 7:00 pm

Cool thoughts, Christian and Brent!

I’m actually much less of a fan with Twitter. But then again, I didn’t know about the fact that you can tie it directly to your online identity. I think that’s a very interesting concept. It seems like a lot of people who are trying to build the “expert” career arc for themselves are much more cognizant of the different things you can do to maintain credit for your thoughts and works. I need to learn a LOT more about that. I even have one friend who’s attended seminars on how to be an “expert”.

For me, being an expert seems pretty obvious - have lots of experience and then talk about your experiences and opinions as they are influenced by your current situation(s). It’s not necessarily a career path that needs to be mapped and then adhered to.

Again, great thoughts.

-Kev

Comment by Chris Shaw

July 30, 2008 @ 3:27 pm

Kevin,

I have spoke with you at Pass for the last 3 or 4 years, as I am sure that you can understand these presentations take a long time to put together. I find the same true of the Articles that I write. Many times I feel like when I write its best to just sit down and just do it then grammer check it later. The problem with this is that we all have full time jobs and we end up, with just not enough hours in the day.

In short what I am saying is that when people like yourself spend more time just getting ideas down on “paper” then I feel like we get the better content.

Thanks for the continued work that you do with SQL Server.

Chris Shaw