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For a while now (since January 2004) I have been posting both to my personal blog (https://www.shahine.com/omar/) and another blog located at https://blogs.msdn.com/omars/. At the time there were about 140 Microsoft blogs on blogs.msdn.com. I don't actually post things twice, rather dasBlog can crosspost both to this blog and any number of other blogs that support the blogger APIs.

My main motivation for doing this was that I wanted to be part of the Microsoft blogger community. I also used to subscribe to the full blogs.msdn.com rss feed, and pretty much read what everyone there was posting. Finally, I also got a lot of great comments from folks on that blog (I supose because they did not specifically subscribe to my feed, but the blogs.msdn.com feed).

In the past 16 months the blogs.msdn.com site has grown an order of magnitude. I no longer feel like my presence is part of a small community and many of the benefits I have felt by crossposting have been overshadowed by things don't care much for. Particularly the new Community Server product. It's made managing my blog, comments, and feedback much more difficult. So much so that I completely ignore the comments on my msdn blog because I find the product unusable. It takes 20 clicks and postbacks to do simple things. I find myself lost. Additionally, the community on blogs.msdn.com is big enough now that I don't think I need to cross post any longer. Don't get me wrong, I wish Scott and company the best of luck with CS, and the fact that is powers our employee blog property is cool, but it's an experiment that is not something I think I need to be a part of.

And just to be clear. I figure that I cross posted 80% of the content on my personal blog to my msdn blog. Anything technology related got crossposted, some personal rants and such did not.

So, my question is this. Does anyone care or even find it confusing that I even do this? Should I stop crossposting? I'm leaning to just mothballing my msdn blog (leaving all the content there, but no longer cross posting). Do people who subscribe to the msdn one want me to keep posting my tech stuff there? Does anyone even care :-)?

PS - Speaking of Community Server, and blogs.msdn.com, I just noticed that Dare also stopped crossposting from his blog to blogs.msdn.com.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2005
    I subscribe to the all-msdn-blogggers feed -- so I'd definitely miss your awesome posts if you moved your blog...
  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2005
    Why not just have a single RSS feed for both blogs and don't cross post. Keep your personal blog 100% personal, the other one 100% technical. People can click through to the articles they want....

    Or maybe that's more confusing. So perhaps just one blog to rule them all.
  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2005
    I prefer all the Microsoft employees to be at a single place. It makes finding new employees and remembering urls easier.
    It seems that some Microsoft employees are helping improve Community Server and it is amaizing that things, as you say, have become more difficult than easy with it.
  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2005
    I think you would be denying a lot of readers a tech insight on many issues by shifting out of MSDN blog.
    Not everyone would be interested in knowing how Omar's day(personal) was; but tech observations sure are a way a lot of people find useful.
    I work for outsourced support for Windows Server; most of the things I learn are by going through tons and tons of text posted at MSDN blog.
  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2007
    PingBack from http://feeds.maxblog.eu/item_1103892.html