Personality in blogging

As I mentioned a short while ago, today I read Joel Comm’s post called Speaking My Mind. I posted a comment in reply, but it’s being held for moderation, so here it is in the meantime.

I completely agree, Joel. I’ve been posting to my blog for nearly 5 years now, but it’s only in the past few months that I’ve really come to experience how powerful it can really be. A few recent examples come to mind. I helped at least 3 people figure out how to change the font of line numbers in Word. I helped about 32 people with a common Windows permissions error. And I helped about 21 people fix an error with TortoiseSVN.

Those are just a couple recent cases, but there are countless others. Blogs are simply amazing. I know that I personally find many of the answers I’m looking for in blogs, so it makes sense that Google and other search engines should want to put them (the reputable ones, at least) near the very top of their search results. When more blogs appear in the results, (if they’re good ones) searchers will be more satisfied.

I admit that there have been times when I held back from expressing my full thoughts because I didn’t think it was appropriate for the public online space. Your post has encouraged me to be more vocal and use my blog to its fullest potential. I hope it only gets better from here.

Another extremely interesting (but somewhat unrelated) post I read today is by Joel on Software on the topic of Bribing Bloggers. This reminds me of the Google Ambassador Program and being a Firefox Campus Rep, which I’ve already mentioned in my blog. If normal college students can have such an influence, how much greater the influence of bloggers must be! This is something to think about.