I've been contemplating this one for a while... I'm not sure where all this blogging thing is going.  Don't get me wrong I love blogging.  I'm just not sure what we are accomplishing (I know a few of you out there I pushed in this direction).  I think we are starting to get a cacophony of noise. 

Several years ago a bunch of people started the blogging thing as a way to talk about what happened to them with the failed DotCom boom (at least that's what Scoble tells us).  Later a few more people started blogging to exchange ideas (as well as some trendy and not so trendy teenagers who wanted to express their teenaged angst).  A couple of years later MS decided that blogging was a good thing and they decided to award some MVPs to some prolific bloggers who were really helping their camp. 

The next wave of bloggers were unknowns (like me) who were trying to make a name for themselves... They were about fame and the free MSDN universal (yep, I was one of those).  Each of these new bloggers tried to make a name for themselves by gravitating to a technology buzzword that they felt that they could make a name for themselves with.  SOA comes to mind... as does TDD, XP, and a whole line of other acronyms.

It's maddening and the advice that flies around is unreal... many times contradictory.  "OR Modelers are one thing you can't live without... you should use {fill in the blank} it's the one I use."  "You should always use Stored Procs, so if the OR Modeler can use SPs great... if not then get rid of the OR Modeler."  "Stored Procs are over hyped."  And this is just from the OR Modeler/anti OR modeler crowd.

There's the SOA crowd, the remoting crowd, the WSE crowd, the open sourcers, and don't forget the security crowd.  I'm getting all kinds of advice, but I'm not sure who to listen to at times because I really don't know who really knows what their talking about.  Ok, seriously I do know a few people who I would consider experts in their field; the problem is some of my other mentors think their ideas are crap... what's a poor "Mort" developer to do... And some of these experts think each other's ideas are crap... WWDBD (What would Don Box Do?  He is the smartest developer that I can think of... maybe it's WWCVD for you --Clemens Vasters, BTW)

Honestly I really don't have a good piece of advice on this.  Do you listen to MVPs only?  Do you give them more credit than others when looking for advice on a new technology?  Maybe you shouldn't because they don't always agree... 

I strive for excellence in what I do.  I think I'm slowly moving toward the path of architecting solutions, but I have old habits die hard, and good advice on what the correct course is even harder.  So what am I talking about?  I know I may not be making total sense, so let's take something practical...

I recently decided to take the plunge (against all advice I have been given) and play with an OOP DB.  I have downloaded the free db4o database and plan on building a few things with it to see if it's really worthwhile or not.  The advice I have been given to date is that storing objects in the database is a bad idea (I've known some people who tried to simply serialize an object and store the string in SQL Server and have watched the local "experts" here rip into the person).  I guess with where I'm at I need to play with some of these new concepts/technologies and decide for myself. I'm still afraid that others around me may tell me I'm dumb for even messing with it...

(Another quick example) Steve Maine recently contacted me to ask what I thought about some stuff regarding Indigo... it was too important of a question to be left to myself, so I asked a couple of the guys around me at work what they thought.  Long story My advisors were not well informed...  Actually I fell like a total @$$ because I met Steve back at the XML DevCon and he's a cool guy... If I were him I probably wouldn't ask me for an opinion again... I lost credibility (or at least I feel like I lost some credibility) because I listened to an expert who was not as much "in the know" as I thought...

[Sorry, no solutions here]