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Blog Posts vs. Articles
Jakob Nielsen says that experts should not blog, Larry O'Brien disagrees and bring some real world data about leads generated from blog posts and articles.
I have a different approach for this, and it is about the time invested vs. the exposure earned. I have published several thousands of blog posts, and I rarely work on a blog post for over a few hours. The single article that I published took several weeks to write and re-write, peer reviewed and get published. The amount of contacts that I got from that vs. the ones that I get from this blog cannot be compared.
Blogging allows me to post quickly, which means that you get a lot of content that would never see the light of day otherwise. To make the cost of putting content out any higher than it should be means that you are limiting what you can do. It means that you will have less visibility and less traffic, in the end.
To my mind, publishing an article is good only for the additional exposure in channels where I don't have access to already (all readers of XYZ Magazine, for instance), but while that has an appeal, I don't see the need to invest the amount of time that would be required to do so.
Comments
Personally, I view blogging as a way of centralizing/recording useful pieces of information that I think I might need later on (or want to share with my small circle of associates).
If the information on my blog happens to be helpful to someone later on down the road, that's a bonus.
In simple terms ... blogging is interactive, articles aren't. That alone makes blogs 10x more useful - not to mention makes them more aligned to to agile.
Articles = BDUF ... Blogs = iterative development
I totally agree with you, Ayende. Some people tell me "Don't post, write articles", but I think that blog is more efficient, and write post is quicker and more agile.
ayende,
writing well is difficult and takes time, as you've noted.
but the fact that you spend a few hours on post is worthy of praise and it shows in your posts.
additionally, the difficulty bar is raised when writing blog posts trying to educate others regarding a specifc subject matter versus a simple blog journal.
in the end though - either writing intriguing journal or educational posts deserves time..otherwise you're cheating your readers.
and you dont cheat your readers ; )
Whatever the channel is, software architects should speak. More English, less C#. Just wrote an artiblog about that @ lgorithms.blogspot.com
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