SNR « The Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ

SNR

03Mar06

I had an interesting chat with a friend and colleague today about our respective blogs. I jokingly made my first post on this blog about getting more people looking at my blog that his. It had been a running joke amongst the development team in our office from the moment he outed himself as a blogger that his hit-count was creeping up past the 2 hits a day mark.

In our discussion Olivier made a point that the best way to generate a massive hit count on your blog was by just espousing some controversial opinion. Now while I believe if you write a blog you have to be opinionated – and in the IT industry there are a lot of opinionated people, it’s practically a requirement – I feel that what’s more important for me is not being opinionated for the sake of it but developing an ability to write interesting and thought-provoking pieces. Incidentally, he agreed with me and I would say that the signal-to-noise ratio on his blog is pretty damn good.

For a while I’ve been running a parallel blog over on blogger.com and my first post there¹ was about the poor signal-to-noise ratio that I fear blogs, now that they’re becoming more and more mainstream, will develop. Right now there are a handful of high quality and interesting blogs that I read. However, like the home pages of 1996, as blogging becomes mainstream the new generation of blogs will probably be full of useful information like where you’ve been on holiday² and how you wired the cables behind your desk³. With pictures. This may be egalitarian freedom of expression but the reality is that if blogs are to survive and become a new publishing medium then the quality has to remain high.

Blogging can be amateur journalism or just plain amateur and, as any aspiring writer will tell you, the key to writing is practice, practice, practice. I’m going to speak my mind and express my sometimes half-formed opinions but I’ll never do it for the sake of generating a temporary audience. I hope, if you’re reading this, that you’ll stay with me while I try to learn my craft.

– Fintan [listening to Jack L]

1 – At the least the first one that survived that is.
2 – I’m going to Connemara tomorrow. I promise there will be no pictures on my blog.
3 – This isn’t the original one I found back in ‘99 but at least if this guy isn’t being original at least he’s more detailed.