For the better part of three years I’ve been troubled by the seemingly exponential growth of crap on the internet – specifically with respect to programming topics (more specifically with respect to .NET). In the past I’ve blogged against poorly written documentation and FUD, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The problem is quite simple: quality technical information is increasingly difficult to find. A chief cause for this is the sheer amount of content being published – increasingly so on personal blogs, which are outside of anyone’s jurisdiction. In fact blogging is so easy and effective that countless clueless developers are now technical authors. A dangerously high percentage of developers will gladly follow any advice they find on the web.
The noise to signal ratio is just too high. A while ago, I
came across a criticism of feed readers for their dumbness on glassdog as well as
a comment from Nick Bradbury (creator of FeedDemon) which aligned themselves with my concerns. As we all know, information management is currently the big thing (think search). Google has changed the nature of information indexing on the web, and huge players are trying to get back into the market space. But Google’s scope is too big to be applicable to something small like .NET programming – I’m not even sure how feasible it is to programmatically determine the quality of a technical article.
I do agree that we need much smarter clients – but that seems complicated. A simpler solution, as far as I’m concerned, is to build stronger and well-defined communities. Unfortunately, ever since the forced break up of weblogs.asp.net, I’ve been keenly aware of fragmentation within the .NET Community. CommunityServer is a great tool when it comes to, what I like to call, small-c communities. What about the big-C .NET Community (there are actually some decent big-C features in CommunityServer). If Paul Vick blogs an absolute gem (which he often does), what percentage of .NET developers are going to see it? Sites like
DotNetSlackers and
DotNetKicks have a lot of potential and maybe that’s the way we ought to keep going.
Part of me wants Microsoft to do something wildly innovate and change the face of web-based communities; something open and pluggable. MySpace is just an imitation of other blogging engines – it isn’t a community, simply a repository. There are a lot of organic indexing examples out there: del.icio.us, digg, Slashdot.
For readers of Kevin Kelly’s out of control, I ask “Where’s my .NET vivisystem?”
Posted
Mon, May 29 2006 4:50 PM
by
karl