Future of .NET Weblogs

ScottW asks “Should the way .NET Weblogs works change?”.

Scott, in my opinion, you are mixing two things:

• The space that DNWL provides to us for our personal weblogs.
• The community emerging from the people who have their weblogs hosted at DNWL.

I don't know exactly what you had in mind first when you decided to create the DNWL, but I have an idea about it ;-).

It seems that you now want to create aggregated feeds. This is really what RSS enables us to do: aggregate feeds to create new sites or feeds.
I think that this is a good idea, but that it isn’t linked to the weblogs hosted on DNWL. For example the "MS guys" feed should not contain only the content of the weblogs from MS guys hosted on DNWL.

The kind of community that DNWL can build is not a community of content where every post from every weblog is interesting as far as .NET is concerned.
What DNWL can do for us (the guys building the community) is attract people toward our weblogs. How do we discover new and interesting weblogs? By jumping from weblog to weblog.
Some weblogs die, others appear. Some stop being interesting because the subjects they address are not as interesting as they used to be for you, while others start to address exactly what is of interest for you.
So please, don't try to filter out some of the content that we produce. What makes the success here (as anywhere) is diversity.
Sam Gentile’s or ScottGu’s weblogs are are attracting more readers than the other weblogs and their RSS is more read than the aggregated one of DNWL? This is no surprise. Who would read the complete DNWL feed? The sum is greater than the parts. That doesn’t mean that it is the complete sum that is interesting. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE NOISE. And what I consider noise may not be what you consider noise.

Scott, you see DNWL as a particular web space. Then what you envision can be done, but with leaving the DNWL as they are currently, and building the aggregated weblogs that you name “categories”.

Whatever you decide to do Scott, we will help you. But it should be something that does not impose a weight on us (the publishers).

In conclusion, here is how I see the whole thing:

• The weblogs should continue to live the way they live currently. We should be ready to give you some money to keep this system alive if needed. If you want to let the development of the DNWL system to someone, you could still hand him the source code out.
• You can create the aggregated weblogs. These weblogs would be the only ones who could really be called the “.NET Weblogs”. The content of these weblogs would be selected mainly from our weblogs, but also from others (there are so many great weblogs related to .NET outside…).
  Some content could also come from dedicated posts only appearing on these weblogs, the way it works on Chris Sells’ weblog.
  Suggestion: one feed for the complete content, plus one feed for each category. This would be close to what Slashdot does. This would allow people to subscribe to selective content.

Even if it looks as a split, I think that it looks like a solution everybody can be happy with.
Our weblogs would be alive and well, and good clean oriented new weblogs would be available for people interested in .NET news. I think that there is an opportunity here to create a Slashdot-like web site (+ RSS feeds) oriented toward .NET and independent from Microsoft.

As a complement, I would also like to reply to Samer Ibrahim’s post:

I really think the problem with the .NET Weblogs feed is it has turned into more a "forum" than a feed of individual blogs.  I've seen that a lot of posts on the .NET Weblogs that seem to be just redundant posts, either people just copying and pasting other people's posts from within the .NET Weblogs feed or commenting on them on their blog when it's more appropriate to comment in the comment section of the orginal poster's blog.

I have to agree when you say that DNWL has turned into a "forum". We tend to read the weblogs of others DNWL weblogers, and quickly reply to them or duplicate their posts.
I agree that it can be bad. But this is good in many ways! People outside DNWL do not read all the DWNL weblogs! It is important that we report news appearing on good DNWL weblogs to attract people to these.
Personally, here is how I see my weblog:

• A personal weblog oriented mainly toward .NET but with some personal opinions on other subjects as well.
• Like a weblog that is not completely tied to DNWL. People reading my web site do not always know that is it hosted on DNWL and DNWL does not mean anything to them.
• A weblog part of a community whose name is .NET Weblogs. That means that I try to have my weblog a true member of the DNWL community, dragging people to other DNWL weblogs, and inserting my weblog into the DNWL flow. My weblog is read mainly because it is on DNWL. It would have been difficult for it to exist outside of this very space because DWNL is a concentrate of good content that attract a lot of readers.

That means that when I post to my weblog, I think of it as part of DNWL, but also as an independent weblog.

I've seen many posts that seem very childish in nature.  People seem to be battling on who's right and attacking each other through the feed as well.  To me this is a place to learn, right and wrong is a matter of opinion. just ask the Linux guys what they think.  In my perception, as the .NET Weblog grows, it will become more and more important for people to be cognizant of their wording and of their fellow bloggers.

DNWL is still very young, and it will take some time before it matures. And at the same time, it will never completely mature. It is a beast that cannot and should not be mastered. The more you’d try to define how it should be, the more you’d be disappointed with what it is really.

My two cents. Whatever happens, I think that .NET Weblogs will remain a success :-)

Update: Roy Osehrove said the same kind of things very clearly. Go and read his opinion too.