MarkItUp

# Live Platform, Blogs, Friends and Professionals
posted by Richard J. Rothery Jr. on 10/24/2007 6:34:46 PM :

Hello Darren,

Your blog post, “My Blogging Activity” leads in to a question and discussion about the Live platform along without differentiating between who and what should go where and what services should be subscribed to.
To clarify the above hear me out. Take my case and relationship to you. I came to know you through researching Web Parts. I read your book, “ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in Action,” which is incidentally fabulous, while searching for solutions to some of my ideas. I found your MarkItUp blog and subscribed some time ago. I know you are in Australia, Adelaide if I am not mistaken, and work for Readify. We have never spoken other than through your MarkItUp blog. I have a LiveSpace along with Live Messenger. I use these two items from the Live platform professionally. Live is a great social networking platform and much more! However, I have no intention of using the platform for extraprofessional activities. Currently, I am a student at University of Phoenix online with a major in software engineering. Even at the university I avoid falling into the ranks of social platforms such as MySpace and Facebook or whosever space is next. Do not get me wrong, these platforms are excellent especially from a code behind services point of view, yet I avoid spaces and places such as Second Life et al.
In reading your MarkItUp blog I came to realize that you shared at least partially, my conservative professional viewpoint of separating those people who wish to socialize and those who want to work. Granted, the two can and do overlap, but the question is, “to what degree?” Where and how do we separate who are our social friends and acquaintances versus our professional friends and acquaintances? This post blurs the lines even more in my opinion, not that you are the reference, rather in the sense that I would like to read about your professional activities with limited glimpses into what I consider your personal life. Both MarkItUp and now your ShowUsYourCode LiveSpace would appear to fuse this separation even if the connection is professional for your purposes.

Best Regards,

# Thanks for your thoughtful reply Richard!
posted by Darren Neimke on 10/24/2007 11:29:51 PM :

Richard, thanks so much for your reply. I'd like to pull a couple of things from your post and expand on them with my own thoughts...


>> differentiating between who and what should
>> go where and what services should be subscribed to

To be honest, I'm obviously not as good at creating a brand, like people such as Scott Hanselman
or some others are. I tend to blog for myself which is why I don't feel that bad about changing tack and moving my primary technical blogging activity into Live. I've recently seen that my enthusiasm for blogging has changed and that I've also been frustrated by the constraints of my own simple blogging engine. Moving forward, I can see that removing the burden of being limited by my own blogging engine will take away some of the stress. Live is great because I'll get all of that great software - LiveWriter and other Live branded integration - for free while knowing that Microsoft will implement whatever new features come along in the future.

So, to summarize, my move to Live Spaces is about helping me to sleep better at night, sound with the knowledge that the blogging platform underneath me is not so fragile. This will leave my MarkItUp.com domain free for the web experimentation that I originally intended it for.

As for the hockey coaching stuff that I'll be blogging over on the other blog that I've set up... I haven't 'announced' that because I want to know that I can build up a whole other community, totally aside from who I am, and what I've set up in my technical world. I want to know that whatever I create over there is based on my own ability to attract readers from a zero base.


>> how do we separate who are our social friends and
>> acquaintances versus our professional friends and acquaintances

Believe me, I struggle with this constantly. The mistake that I made when I entered Facebook is that I accepted invites from everyone that I knew - including everybody that I work with. I ended up with total spam - half of which I really didn't like. So my Facebook site is no longer representative of me! That's partly why I'm moving to Live; to try and get it right this time. I'd actually like it if these social networking portals allowed you to segment your friends.

>> who and what should go where and what services should be subscribed to.

Here's a thought.. more people should change who they are subscribed to more regularly. Kinda like a spring clean. Of the 400 people that Feedburner says are subscribed to my blog, I'll bet that more than half of those could care less about what I write. At the end of the day, I'd rather have 5 good friends subscribed to my blog than 500 of whom 300 just pressed 'ctrl+q' every time one of my posts appeared in their aggregator!

# Blogging and Social Networks
posted by Richard J. Rothery Jr. on 10/31/2007 12:19:50 AM :

Darren,

Thanks for responding and re-introducing the term branding to my vocabulary. I have heard Scott Hanselman’s name in passing more than once thus, I will stop in to his site for a look.

It is understandable what you say about developing and maintaining one’s own blog or even further, a network domain. I quite actually enjoy the freedom of hosting two low exposure domains right from the house. However, one of the tradeoffs often is security and the time it takes to accomplish administrative tasks.

Live is a great platform and certainly may lighten the administrative load. I am a serious Microsoft (MS) advocate. The MS team is enormous and obviously can accomplish more than any one individual or just about any team for the matter. However, I try to learn as much as I can about all facets of web development therefore, I am selective about the services I do not develop myself. Developers certainly need test development domains/platforms to expand their savoir-faire. I am continually looking to augment my server base.

>> I'd actually like it if these social networking portals allowed you to segment your friends.

Segmented social networks (SSN), I like the sound of that one. This SSN could be a service/module that should be worked on if it isn’t already a team project somewhere.

>> Here's a thought.. more people should change who they are subscribed to more regularly. Kinda like a spring clean.

As for spring cleaning, I agree that one must be diligent with blogs, favorites, or even just within one’s filing system. If you want to know a little about an individual, take a peek at their PC’s organization.

>> At the end of the day, I'd rather have 5 good friends subscribed to my blog than 500 of whom 300 just pressed 'ctrl+q' every time one of my posts appeared in their aggregator!

It is a pleasure to read that you weight the qualitative aspects of your subscribers higher than the quantitative aspects.

Now, my question for you is, which of your blogs do I subscribe to?

Best Regards,
Richard

# دليل المواقع
posted by دليل المواقع on 8/17/2009 4:58:53 PM :

Thanks for responding and re-introducing the term branding to my vocabulary. I have heard Scott Hanselman’s name in passing more than once thus, I will stop in to his site for a look.

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