Is ALT.NET Becoming Incestuous?
Filed Under Thought StuffDon’t get me wrong, I love the ALT.NET guys, but is the ALT.NET email group a blessing or a burden?
On pace of ~200 messages a day, it appears outside conversation is disappearing in the blogosphere. Where are the weekly rants of Bellware? Where are Laribee’s anecdotes? Others seem to have abandon their blogs altogether…
I am disappointed in seeing this for two reasons:
1. Part of the reason for ALT.NET was to raise awareness to others about the alternative ways of development. Without outside conversation in the blogosphere, the chance of people stumbling upon the gold mine of the information being discussed is very small. These conversations are better in blogs for higher visibility and prosperity.
2. If you expose your ideas and debates solely to your peers, in time you will receive no more than general agreement and head nodding.
Personally, I don’t have time to digest all the great conversation. ALT.NET was great, but all good things come in small packages. What will be left for next year? Are we just going to all sit around the bar silent?
P.S. Props to Miller, JP, and Ayende for keeping their blogging pace.
4 Responses to “Is ALT.NET Becoming Incestuous?”
Good point. I’ve noticed the same trend. Besides being a better at reaching a wider audience, I also think that blogs are a better format for discussions. I’ve noticed that the author tends to put more time into thinking out and communicating their thoughts in a blog post than they do in an email. I also think that the comment section of a blog is also much easier to read than a ton of email replies filled that consist of 90% copied text that you have to mentally filter out.
Down with incestuous news groups!
But I’m just old fashioned that way…:-)
Two quick points.
1. Unfortunately forums seem to be following the same trend that Max has pointed out in the blogosphere. Beyond both the readability point that Russell commented about, and the head nodding Max posted about, we lose the almighty “Google” it to find answers when we have problems. The search-ability and being able to read the discussion of why people made their decisions is one of the great benefits the Internet has offered us. Why make the same mistake other developers have rather then being able to learn from those mistakes with a quick search and reading session.
2. It might be a bit easier to put an option out there if people will all react by patting your back, but if your view stands the heat of a few people questioning it that view seems that it holds a lot more validity to it. If the option seems to crumble under a little pressure, maybe you should have been questioning the viewpoint in the first place.
I agree Max, I haven’t seen nearly as many good posts lately on CodeBetter.
They need to bubble up the good stuff.
From my experience, Twitter is scratching my blog itch, for now.
But, yes, we do need better content on our blogs.