Randy Holloway at Microsoft

You should separate your personal opinion from this weblog since it is a Microsoft site.

Why not just keep it all on one blog- we don't want to bloat our OPML files!

Thanks for the feedback- I'm maintaining a personal site at the following location, for those interested. Here's a recent rant- http://www.clrsql.com/weblog/archives/000020.html.

Difficult one, if you were making a personal comment on why VS sucks because it eats your HTML (damnit, gimmie the next version already) then it belongs here. Maybe political stuff belongs elsewhere. Then there's stuff inbetween like "Here's a summary of what I did on holiday" then I guess it could live in both.

Thanks Barry- I tend to think that you're right, but I'm interested to see what other folks think too. Rich complained that he doesn't want to read more than one blog per person also, but that's probably where things are heading.

Personal blog entries that appear on blogs.msdn.com are an unprofessional irritant. Please understand, it's not personal, but personal items should show up on the msdn.com domain.

Thanks for asking! Finally, someone did.

Check that! Typo!

, but personal items should *NOT* show up on the msdn.com domain.

Thanks Paul, great feedback. Be sure to take a look at my personal blog if you're so inclined- http://www.clrsql.com.

I totally disagree: I say blog about whatever you want to, it's *your* blog.

I asked a similar question a few weeks back, and out of the 20 responses (some email, some blog), 18 preferred me to blog about 'whatever I want', and only 2 said "keep it tech".

More here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/smakofsky/archive/2004/09/09/227340.aspx

and

http://www.furrygoat.com/CommentView.aspx?guid=ece0a988-77b0-4965-adfa-d35fa45c76e1

(my personal site cross posts to MSDN)

Randy, I moved to http://dbvt.com/blog two months ago after blogging at http://weblogs.asp.net/dburke for over a year. I feel that weblogs.asp.net and blogs.msdn.com should be about .NET, Microsoft, application development, and related issues ONLY. I tried to be true to that while at weblogs.asp.net, but enjoy the freedom to post whatever the heck I want at dbvt.com/blog.

What I started doing recently was when entering technical posts on dbvt.com/blog, also enter a brief post at weblogs.asp.net/dburke to describe the issue with a link to the dbvt.com/blog item. That gives me the continued freedom to post on various topics at my personal blog, yet be part of the weblogs.asp.net community of developers which is very important to me. It is also, admittedly, an effective way to bring more eyeballs to my personal blog.

I think this would be a good model for those of us who want weblogs/msdn blogs to be focused on technology as a pure .NET resource yet providing the option to learn more about the developer's personal side through off-topic posts. Authors would have a personal blog as well as a feed at weblogs/msdn. As a reader, I would subscribe to weblogs/msdn for technical info, and to individual blogs to learn more about the developer's personal side.

I use the same blog, but faithfully categorize entries to make it easier to search. I think that's what categories were invented for in the first place.

I struggled with this one for awhile too, but I eventually learned that people want to know a little bit about the personality of the poster. As a point of interest, I've been blogging for almost 1 year now, and the top posts on my blog (which is hosted at blogs.msdn.com) are all personal...by a long shot.

Shouldn't the editorial direction of a blog be up to the author?

Michael- I would tend to agree, but there are two issues here. One, my blog is hosted by Microsoft, so there are policy considerations and "common sense" considerations. Second, and more important to this audience, many (perhaps most) of my visitors are directed here because of the MS blog portal or because of the main feed for MSDN/ASP.Net weblogs. As a result, I want to meet the expectations of the readers. The readers seem to have a split opinion on this issue.

Hi again,

I would like to take a moment to clarify my "no personal material on blogs.msdn.com" position. A number of people have expressed the opinion that the subject matter in a blog is entirely up to the author. There is strong reasoning in favor of this view, including:

1. The very nature of blogging assumes that there aren't very many impediments to posting. The lack of editorial oversight is a design feature of blog culture. Therefore, it is natural to see random and personal entries on web logs.

2. Efforts to exert editorial control on blogs would tend to work against the whole point of having blogs to begin with, since an editorial review step would either impede the speed with which new items were published, or hamper the frank and unequivocal expression of ideas, or both.

So, it is expected that those familar with blog culture would react unfavorably to the idea that certain material didn't belong in their blogs.

However, I might point out that many blog publishers are already familiar with the practice of catagorizing blog entries. This makes it easier for a reader to focus on the material he is interested in. Why not extend on this concept? Some web forum software includes the idea of 'filters,' so posts of particular categories that are not of any relevance to the reader can be silently removed from view.

I suggest that there should be a category, flag or some other indicator which signals that a blog post is appropriate to appear on the semi-official MS blog portals, like the front page of http://blogs.msdn.com . When I wrote that personal items do not belong on the msdn.com domain, what I really meant were these venues. Once I get to a personal weblog from a link on a blog portal, I don't mind seeing personal entries. But when browsing the front page of blogs.msdn.com, it's inappropriate for users to see posts like the following:

"OMG! My first blog entry!"

"My baby is a demon who won't let me sleep"

"I went to a great concert last night!"

I hope that this expresses my opinion a little more effectively, thanks for reading.

Randy, I posted a comment I spent some time and effort on Friday. Your blog is moderated (and its your blog, after all), but I was curious why my comment wasn't accepted and does not appear here?

Dave- I apologize for that. I ALWAYS allow all comments, unless they include spam or something patently offensive. I don't recall receiving a comment notification, but didn't intentionally exclue any feedback.

Randy, That makes me feel better. My point was that it is important to me personally that blogs.msdn.com and weblogs.asp.net remain focused on technology. My suggestion was for developers to set up a personal blog (as I have--though not a realistic expectation for everyone, I realize) and either cross-post or post descriptions of technical posts to msdn/weblogs with links to the full posts on their personal blogs. This allows us to keep msdn/weblogs technology-focused as well as subscribe to individual developer blogs to learn more about the personal side of developers where they can post about any darn thing they want.

Thanks!

Dave- good point. Also, anyone should be able to set up a personal blog because their are several FREE weblog services. Still taking input here, but I'm leaning towards pushing my personal blog over to http://clrsql.com and then posting any SQL 2005 content over here on MSDN. Thanks.

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