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September 26, 2005

Put Yourself Out There

I finally got my first up-close-and-personal look at the UW MBA Class of 2007 today.

'07 is winding down their orientation this week, and classes start on Wednesday. As part of their annual "Welcome to UW, your brain is now mush" info overload, the MBA administration asked Rebecca Lovell ('06) and me to reprise last year's "Informational Interviewing 101" session late this afternoon.

The presentation is designed to alert new MBAs to some of the fabulous opportunities they have to meet and learn from people in the business community. (A PDF of my handout is available; 206k).

(If this sounds familiar, it's because I've talked about this before - during a Preview Day in April.)

Following the preso, I got to mingle a bit. The people are the usual UW MBA types - friendly, self-deprecating, curious, intense - and the questions fell along the usual lines about the program, internships, Microsoft, and the rest of it.

What shocked me, however, was the number of people who told me they read my blog.

Look, I've had extended coffee conversations with Richard, Jeff, and others about "this blogging thing" and how big of a deal it really is. The positions on blogs seem to be a) this blogging thing is the Pet Rock of the Internet age, and will go away with a little more time, or b) the world is fundamentally different, and everyone, as well as their dogs, will have a blog.

The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle. But after today, I'm moving my personal needle all the way to the "b" side. The world is different, baby.

Let me explain. First, there are some people who don't "get" blogs, in that they don't see what makes blogging different from what came before. "What makes blogging special?" they ask. "Why not just fire up a copy of FrontPage/DreamWeaver/GoLive and edit your Web site that way? What's so new about blogs?"

As a semi-technical geek who still codes pages with BBEdit, I understand this position. To the initiated, Web-page editors are reasonably simple to operate. And, from that perspective, Web-page editors and blogging tools seem to do much the same thing. So what makes blogging tools so novel?

The answer is contained in the question. Yes, it's true: for the initiated, Web-page editors are no big deal. The problem is, for the un-initiated, they're a big pain in the ass. I doubt very much that, back in 1450, people who had squads of monks to do their copying and transcription "got" the need for Johannes Gutenberg's new toy. "What's the big deal?" they (may have) asked. "Monks have been able to put ink on paper for a long time. What's with all the noise being made around this punk and his printing press?"

The noise is about simplicity:

• Simplicity of the interface. Blogging tools are basically nothing more than room for a headline, room for the body of the post, and a button that says "PUT ON THE WEB". That makes blog publishing easy to understand for most people.
• Simplicity of the software. Most blogging software is hosted, which means that there's nothing to install or configure for the blogger. Set up an account, log in, and go to town. Also, there's nothing to maintain, patch or update from a technology standpoint - the blog host does that for you.
• Simplicity of setup. You can often choose your look-and-feel and site features - like search - off the rack. This helps people who would otherwise freak out and say, "But I'm not a designer!"
• Simplicity of distribution. Look, you click the button. And then your post goes live, published, worldwide, for anyone and everyone to see. And with the advent of RSS, it's now possible to subscribe to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of 'little' Web sites on an automated basis. That means blog visitors don't need to obsessively check your site for new stuff; instead, the new stuff comes to them.

With such dead-bang-simple tools, setup, and distribution, the blogging market has exploded. What are these blogs all about? Well, it looks like noise, right? People talking about their pets or their church or their knitting (yo, Judy!) or their bands or whatever. But what you realize - and what was driven home to me today, with the students in '07 - is that if you're looking for something specific (like, say, the experiences of people in the University of Washington MBA program), the noise pivots and becomes, instead, pure signal.

Entire communities (often blogs themselves) have evolved to collect, filter, and distribute comprehensive links to any topic you can imagine. In the case of the MBA, I kept asking students how they found my site. The most common answer? "MBA League", or the League of MBA Bloggers (mbaleague.blogspot.com), which is an aggregator of blogs of MBA students throughout the country. This means that a person thinking about getting their MBA can quickly and easily zero in on bloggers who happen to be going through that very experience right now.

Multiply this raw-from-the-source information stream by every conceivable interest, hobby, research project, or fetish, and the appeal of the blogosphere crystallizes. It's not a cacophony; it's a chorus. You just have to know what you're listening for.

This ability to listen crosses borders, too. I was amazed by the fact that some of the most blog-aware and blog-enthused students were our International students. They'd done a lot of research on different schools and options, and were very familiar with MBA blog sites and specific MBA bloggers. It blew me away.

So here's the thing: start a blog. No, really. I've had more conversations with people about who "should" and "should not" blog, and I'm here to tell you: if it interests you, put it out there. Just make sure your blogging style is something that's authentically you, and something that makes you happy.

Let me explain. We have a handful of Planners in Office that blog. Some of them do so under their own names, some are anonymous. Some blog all the time, others intermittently. Some write about work, some never do. Some write long posts, some write short posts (or just post photos). And some are sloppy and organic, while others are more editorially rigorous.

My point in explaining this is to simply say there is no "right" way to blog. Furthermore, while I might not give much of a damn about what you're putting on your blog on any given day of the week, I can virtually guarantee that someone else not only cares, but will love it. With the advent of precise search engines, the stuff will get indexed, and it will get found.

I love that my friends blog. Coming home at the end of a long day, it makes me glad that my aggregator is filled with news that I find personally interesting. I love that I can read about what's going on with Cintra, or Jason, or Khan, or Ravi, or see that John Gruber has posted something new, or that Wil Shipley has written yet another novel with his characteristic sense of humor. It makes me feel connected to people I don't see often enough (or, in the case of Gruber, people I've never actually met, but would love to buy a beer for one day).

Writing a blog has surprised me. When I started it, it was mostly for friends and relatives, people I knew. I had a focused topic ("Confessions of a Microsoft MBA intern"), and (mostly) stuck to it. But as time has gone on and I've put more stuff out there (Seattle Storm, monorail news), I've found some of the damndest referral links in my log files. You never know who's going to be looking for what's in the contents of your head. So put it out there.

Get started. Please. It's easy. Try TypePad, Blogger, or MSN Spaces.

If you send me your link, I'll add you to my RSS reader. Promise.

UPDATE, December 4, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at September 26, 2005 9:48 PM. Posted to Misc.

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Posted by: Judy H. at September 28, 2005 9:13 PM

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