White Noise
I completely agree with the spirit of what Jay is saying here (please read his post first). I think I suffer from a rare ailment among developers. It's a disorder that affects very few in the development community (at least above the newbie/jr level). It's humility. I rarely find that my insight or knowlege is earth shattering enough to pontificate about it. I don't mean to offend anyone out there, but it's just the way I feel. I think blogs are a wonderful way of disseminating information. I also feel they are a very useful tool in growing as developers by sharing our insights and questions and getting the "opinions" of our peers. The problem is the overly inflated egos in our annonymous online world leave us wondering who's advice we should heed. It's easy to sound like an expert when we read a few articles and whitepapers then come to the blogosphere and spout off the techno-babble they've indoctonated us with just to give ourselves a feeling of importance. Maybe it's becasue we feel so under-appreciated at work that we need to fill that need by “being an expert“ and sharing our vast wisdom with the world. I'm not saying that the information that we give/get in blogs is without merit. It's just that it's hard to judge the validity of the information or the level of expertise with which it's given.
Don't get me wrong, there are true experts out there and having this type of personal contact and the ability to share ideas with the best of the best is truly amazing. When a lowly developer in the midwest is facing a problem and can go to their blog and recieve ideas from some of the elite in the field, that's when we know this experiment has succeeded. I just feel that Jay is right though. I feel there is a lot of noise out there and at times it can be daunting to sift through it all for the nuggets of wisdom that we are looking for. Taking the advice we get with a grain of salt is imperitive. We must use this as a starting point from which we can gain new insights, but those insights can not go unchecked. We absolutely must invest ourselves in testing the validity of the opinions we recieve.
So what am I doing about it you may ask? Well at the moment I'm just adding to the noise and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future, but at times I wonder when all this information is going to cause a memory leak and I'll just have to reboot <grin/>.