Why blogging - a waste of time?

There have been various discussions about the blogging phenomena and some worries that too much sensitive company information could bleed out to the public. Other people worry about the time "wasted" in writing and reading blogs. As Captain Jake put it over in delphi.non-tech:

> Who has the time to write it all?

Good point, actually. I'm geeky enough to (admit that) I use a laptop on the tram back-and-forth to work. That's about 1 hour per day. For some time now, I've spent that tram-time (and some evenings, I must admit) in writing TDM articles and tech editing Xavier's and Jon's books. As Jon was taking a hike in the Grand Canyon (great pictures! - well worth a look), I had some idle time between chapters.

I wasn't up to writing a complete magazine article, so I decided to try and join this blogging craze. This means that as new chapters start dropping into my inbox, the rate of my blog articles will most certainly decline. Still, I like the persistence of a blog and the fact that I can write anything I like (within the limits of law). And the conformity of RSS and Atom feeds means that it is easy for readers to know when there is something new to read, without having to poll a web page manually.

Newsgroups are nice, but the signal-to-noise ratio for interesting information is irritatingly low. It is much more productive to monitor a selected list of relevant and high quality blogs. I was talking to a friend, showing him the hack to gain write access to the Screen.PixelsPerInch property. He just shook his head and said;

"Hack is your middle name".

Thus the idea of writing about some of the hacks I've played with over the years materialized. Hopefully, I'll find the time to write about less suspicious programming techniques and more about higher level topics some time in the future... :-).