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Re: Where have all the bloggers gone?
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Posted: Feb 14, 2004 4:21 PM
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> Bill has done one really outstanding job on this website
> providing a forum and a tool for quite a large number of
> people. I hope he has not gotten discouraged. If he has, I
> know I am partly to blame.
>
I'm not discouraged by any means. When I give people a blog, it is with no commitment on their part to post on any regular schedule. Posting to a blog is writing. Good writing takes time, and interesting people are busy.
I frankly have the same problem. I want to write to my own blog regularly, and yet I almost never am able to justify the time it requires. Something else is always higher priority. I even made New Year's resolution that I would blog once a week in 2004, on Thursdays, but it hasn't happened. Although I did at least start posting my blog topic ideas as drafts, so they wouldn't be lost. I have about 7 or 8 drafts posted right now. But I still hope to post once a week eventually, because a blog is a great venue for writing, and it is a great way for readers to get to know you more personally.
The other activity that has suffered in my case is the enhancements to the blogs. I have wanted to make several enhancements to the blogs, but for the past six months haven't been able to justify the time required. Other tasks -- such as dealing with the scalability problem last fall, creating the survey I ran in December, doing the Articles feature, designing and building the Pavilion -- were all rather more urgent high priority tasks. Perhaps I need to be more like a thread scheduler that gives lower priority tasks a little bit of CPU time, even when higher priority tasks are not blocked. But under intense pressure, I tend to focus exclusively on the high-priority threads. Threads for lower priorities -- such as posting the blog, making the blog enhancements, and fixing a few nagging bugs in these forums -- are starved.
All that being said, I would enjoy it if people posted more, partly because it brings in readers to Artima, and partly because I like reading the blogs myself. In the survey I ran last December, 41% of the respondents said that one of the reasons they come to Artima is to read the blogs. Many commented that they wished their favorite bloggers would post more often. The basic stats are here:
http://www.artima.com/demographics.html
On the survey, I also let people type in comments by hand. Here are some of the blog-related comments.
Why do you visit Artima.com?
Because you host blogs for people whose opinions I respect
To read the writing of people like Jim Waldo, Ken Arnold, Ward Cunningham, et al. Lately too many people blogging who are frankly not of the same caliber, and this dilutes the site's value.
What can you get at Artima.com that you can't get at other sites?
personal blogs from great coders.
Love the interviews. Weblogs are good (some of them).
The quality of people who blog at your site as well as quality of people interviewed.
Interviews with and blogs by highly respected and experienced developers
Good Interviews, some (but not all) useful blogger's opinions
Interesting interviews and blogs about renown programmers/designers. The forum discussions are also interesting most of the time and have a higher quality (and much higher S/N) than any of the other sites I know
blogs and interviews from several people I respect
A terrific set of bloggers, interviews and good objective writing
Don't know about can't get elsewhere, but I do like the weblogs of industry-leaders. Very thought provoking stuff. I'm not aware of being able to find the concentration of quality ideas anywhere else, as opposed to individual's websites.
Interviews and weblogs of leading-light developers.
The blogs and the interviews
The articles and weblogs of thought-leaders in the software industry are features that I do not see elsewhere - at least not as often and as uncluttered by other news.
Weblogs of industry personalities and unique interviews.
blogs from a top-notch community of developers
The best progammers interviewed, writing articles, and blogging
High profile interviews, high profile weblogs.
developer aggregation and great interviews, informative (but sparse) developer cult-of-personality weblogs.
What is missing at Artima.com? What could be improved? What do you want more of?
A lot of the "industry name" people who have been recruited to provided Weblogs haven't contributed anything in a long, long while. They should probably be dropped if they're not going to contribute something at least, say, once a quarter.
The blog content was been a little weak lately. Not a huge problem, just an observation.
Hassle some of your weblog authors (GuidoVR, RobertCMartin, WardCunningham) to post more :)
More frequent weblogs.
expert blogs... (can't blame the authors for not finding time)
I wish some of the bloggers would post more often. For me, ideally there would be one new blog or article a day -- not too many, not too few!
More active weblogs (though I know it can't be helped)
A "size" to blogs, so we can see how many (bytes, characters, lines, whatever) the blogger wrote. I usually don't read long blogs, unless it's from someone I respect, so I would like to see how much time the blogger wants me to spend to read his opinion/thoughts
maybe I'm missing part, and I suppose I'm not doing my share, but Artima never seems to make it all the way to being a 'community'. Rarely are there followups to the articles or blog entries... I seldom if ever see conversations develop. I realise that you can't exactly just create that kind of thing though. Keep up the great work with the site though, it's one of the best sites on the web.
I want those self-same developers to write more frequently in their weblogs... ;)
Blogs. I find that the quality of blogs in general is pretty low (so I'm not a big reader of buzz) but about 50% of the artima blogs interest me, but a lot of the time there's nothing new when I stop by in the morning.
It would be wonderful if you can make all those "I have not blogged yet" people to start bloging, Bill. :)
I like it the way it is- you guys get top notch programmers doing interviews and making weblog posts. it's goooood.
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