Public Class GeoffAppleby

What started out as a little rant, but now looks like a fairly big one.

Excuse me for moment. I need to sound off about something that's been bugging me for a while now. First an explanation of where I'm coming from.

I try to keep myself up to date with the things that interest me - and, being who i am, that means pretty much anything to do with code, coding, and lately, anything just plain geeky at Microsoft.

How do I do this? Blogs. Blogs rock (as anyone anyone actually reading this would probably agree). Especially with the push that's come about with all the MS staff blogging, there's a hell of a lot to learn, in a relatively small space. Personally, I have two ways of reading all the info that's out there.

The first is with my RSS reader. I subscribe to about 20 or 30 - or maybe more, I've lost count and I'm not at work - specific blogs that almost always talk about things that really interest me, or often provide links to things that do. These include a few different MS staff members for code and VS tips and updates, some closer to home (re: Aussie!) developers blogs for a chance to hear some local news and gossip, and a few general informational things like MS Watch, Scobles blog, and Peanuts, Dilbert, and the Daily WTF. These are all setup at work, where i spend 5 out of 7 days every week.

On top of that, both at work and at home, I go to some extra websites to catch the stuff I've missed. It's pretty much summed up in three sites - blogs.msdn.com, weblogs.asp.net (filtered to non-microsoft staff), and, of course, dotnet junkies. By going to these a few times a day to read the most recent posts, I can catch the interesting stuff that pops up once in a while that I don't want to actually subscribe to.

And this works well. If there's anything else out there of interest, chances are that someone else on these sites has linked to it. This doesn't always work, but so far I've been kept pretty much up to date on things that matter to me (like, say, IE, or team system, or an upcoming free something or other that's on it's way...)

Now for the rant.

There's actually a lot of other ways to find information and perhaps contribute some decent information back in to the community (both of which i honestly do want to do). My other favourite is the aus-dotnet mailing list, which is an aussie run list for .net help and discussions, and is generally a very interesting read, even if you can't actually help someone with an answer.

So what else do we have?

There's wikis. There's forums. There's informational websites. There's newsgroups.

They're all a really good way of finding out stuff, getting help, and helping other people. I do acknowledge this - there's often a lot of good information there.

But they all suck.

Wikis are just plain confusing. A good is example is that i tried to look at the Burton Wiki last night. Sure, it's a great feature that you can go and edit the page...but how can you find anything? i really couldn't find a nice ordered list of things to read.

Forums are a nightmare. The problem with forums is that everyone goes and posts there, so you get stuck reading messages from all these people whose are opinions are so unlike your own that 90% of what's there isn't worth reading, and the other 10% is too hard to find. Sure, you can discuss many different things, but how much of it is useful? A fantastic example of that is forum posts i see discussing IE - why didn't they do this, why didn't they do that, why didn't they do something else? Get over it guys. They didn't, normally because they either a) didn't have time, b) didn't think of it, or c) made a mistake. It's very rare for them to answer d) because they have a personal agenda against you and you only. But forum posters so often seem to think answer d) is all that applies. If not that, it must e) the guys that wrote it are really stupid.  Don't even get me started on SlashDot. Man i hate that place.

Remind me some other time, if you care, to get me to explain exactly why it is that I am really against Open Source (as in Linux) development (more specifically GPL crap), but at the same time i expect there to exist the (easily obtainable) source code for most things that I want. It sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. But that's another time maybe.

Newsgroups are full of retards. This is pretty much a blanket statement, but it's hard to find good help on a place where there's so many damn bigots. sure, there's people that help, people that want to help, but i haven't found a newsgroup yet that doesn't have at least two very vocal, very active regular posters that spout shit, demeaning shit, or wrong shit. Blogs, to me, are the newsgroups of the future. Especially with the coming of .net, with the more and more vocal presence of all the MS staff people know more and more about so many different things. You're own blog entry is, say, a question, and so long as people read your blog (or even the aggregated version is enough 9 times out of 10), then someone will appear with the answer for you, and leave it in the feedback section. To me this is a great responsibility of the blogging community - if you know the answer to some question, post the answer! If you don't, shut the hell up. Blogs seem to often get this right. Newsgroups posters don't seem to.

What caused me to have this whinge? I finally got around to going and checking out Channel 9. I've been meaning to have a proper look at this place for a while now. Sure, i've been there to check the occasional video, yeah, but i never stopped and looked around. Everyone raves about such a great resource it is, and sure, it probably does have a lot of information.

But how on earth do you find stuff? How do you keep track of it all? I took a proper look at the layout of the web pages, and all i see is a cramming of too much information.

This is most likely a piece of bigotry on my part - i can certainly admit my failings ...if it serves my purpose to :) - but one of the things that i absolutely can't stand if information overload. So many web sites do this, however, that people start to accept it as standard, rather than think about a better way to present content.

You see, the problem with sites like this is that they think a homepage is the be-all and end-all of it all. On the homepage you need to get everybody's attention, you need to make sure that there's something there to catch someones eye. Many different places follow this trend - some examples off the top of my head are (locally) - the Optus web site (Optus is one of the largest telcos and net providers in australia...second largest i think), the BigPond homepage is fairly full on too (just to keep it fair...Bigpond part of Telstra, the largest telco).

Moving further a field, let's checkout some of the big names in the internet world. Amazon flood you with ads on their homepage. Sure, they're trying to sell stuff, but who goes to amazon to browse? You at least have a general area you want to look at first. Why not make it easier to find those categories?

What on earth am i supposed to with the homepage for Yahoo? I don't think i need to say anything else here. The MS homepage has had an improvement done recently, but what about MSDN? It's getting better, but there's still a flood of stuff. The individual developer centers are alright (for example, the VB developer center) but really all you get is an MRU of recently added stuff, which is fine for people who come back and check regularly, but for a person new to the site? It's a one paragraph message from Duncan, and a spam of links (spam, in this context, is how i choose to represent an overabundance of something that's not really wanted, like a herd of cows or a gossip of crows - well, i want cows for dinner...). Oh, and there's Duncan's blog entries, which aren't that useful for a newbie either.

So what does Channel 9 give us to start with? the most recent movies, a list of pics and some names, and some 'Active' somethings.  That's nice, but what's channel 9? If i end up there somehow, how, as someone who's never heard of it, do i know what the site is for and what i do with it?

I think I'll just stick with blogs. Blogs are easy. Blogs are just email-looking things. An aggregated page (like blogs.msdn.com) is nice and simple to read - yes, you have to know what it is you're looking at first, but something with blogs in the title is better than something called 'Channel 9' (which, to me, is a free-to-air television station). OK, i tell a lie there - they're mostly simple to read. some people still feel the need to cram as much as damn possible onto their pages, but its forgivable. As a blogger, most of us never claim to web designers. Ok, well, I don't, anyway.

Now that I've said all that, I'm sure all these places (Channel 9 and the Burton Wiki - even other wikis) have some very useful information. I just don't have the time or the patience to try to find it. Blogs+GoogleSearch=Easy to find. Anything else, no thanks - I'm too busy reading other blogs :)