JBoss Blogging
March 16th, 2007
I think part of the problem is that a lot of interesting JBoss blogging occurs at places other than blogs.jboss.com. Basically, you simply have to look further than blogs.jboss.com.
For example, the JBoss Rules team blogs hellagood over at the JBoss Rules Blog. The Hibernate/Seam guys are blogging on the Hibernate Blog. Many other individual JBoss folks blog on their own personal blogs.
So I don’t think it’s so much that JBoss bloggers are boring and corporate. Instead, I think it’s more a problem of not pulling all of this interesting content back in a single easy-to-find place. Yes, indeed, I’ll allow you to argue that it shouldn’t require you to look so hard.
I do realize that folks view blogs.jboss.com as “the voice of JBoss” but in reality, no single voice exists. A lot of the voices do use blogs.jboss.com, but many do not. My team is ultimately working to help bring all of this interesting activity into a single place. That’ll make it easier to see it all. Hooray for RSS.
As far as blogging about “projects” instead of “issues” goes, I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive. An “issue” is ultimately just a choice that has to be made. Developers make choices all the time.
He’s right, we do blog a lot of announcements, which summarizes the results of choices that were made and issues that were dealt with. Perhaps we could blog more about choices before and during those critical points. Then we’d be blogging about “issues” instead of just results.
It would be better to blog things as the occur, instead of after-the-fact. It would certainly help increase the community involvement.
Plus, the blog would read as more of a narrative. And everyone likes a good story. Particularly if it has drama, anguish, hope, crisis and resolution. Like a day in a developer’s life, ultimately.
March 16th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
or how about a Planet JBoss? that would pull in the individual blogs without disrupting their current purposes and agendas.
if there is one already, i’ve missed it.
March 16th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Stephen–
Yep, exactly. We do need one. There is *some* aggregation going on now at JBoss.ORG, but not nearly at the level we should be doing it.
March 16th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
These things already exist. We write our content over at blogspot, http://markproctor.blogspot.com/, as it has good authoring facilities and allows for visibility outside of jboss. However all our content is syndicated to the jboss rules blog at jboss.org, http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossrules/blog, further to that jboss.org also aggregates all the blogs that it has, http://labs.jboss.com/portal/blog?noproject=true.
Mark
March 17th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Maybe blogs.jboss.com sucks because most of us would rather code than blog? Just a thought…
March 19th, 2007 at 4:38 am
glad to kick off this discussion. well done for taking it in the right spirit bob. seriously.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:53 am
For me it is really simple - JBoss was a private company and taking Marc’s lead it was easy to be more controversial and stimulate debate in the blog. Red Hat is a conservative public company (at least, and especially, when it comes to PR) and as one of the spokespeople, I am taking a conservative approach until I understand the boundaries better. I’ve worked for private companies for seven years, so it is an adjustment.
I HAVE slipped some things in here and there though :-) …
March 20th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Touche’ Pierre. I appreciate the difference, for sure, but there are other FAR MORE “corporate” companies that do blog in an energetic, personal, style.