I love stumbling upon new networking-focused blogs. Many of my old friends switched to the dark side vendors and stopped blogging, others simply gave up, and it seems like there aren’t that many engineers that would like to start this experiment.

One of the obvious first questions is always “what should I write about” and my reply is always “it doesn’t really matter – make sure it’s useful.”

That was too easy. Let me rephrase it: make sure it’s useful to your audience (whoever the audience is).

The audience might be yourself in the not-so-distant future. Some people love to publish their study notes or their configuration tricks, and if someone stumbles upon them and finds them useful, you get extra karma points.

Just make sure everything you publish is technically correct and doesn’t contain obvious spelling/grammar errors, because your future employer might decide to check you out before hiring you, and a brain dump full of obvious gotchas doesn’t reflect well on you, does it?

It’s also really easy to start blogging if you turn the “let’s start blogging” challenge into “let’s document what I just did because I don’t trust my long-term memory”

Other people try to do blatant promotion of themselves, their employers or their products. I won’t waste any more bits on them.

Finally, there are people trying to make an impact or send a message. I love reading those blog posts as long as they adhere to rule#1. Always try to answer a simple question: why would someone invest their time into reading what you wrote? Give them something they cherish – be it a hint, an insight, a war story, an alternate perspective, or challenge their beliefs. In short: be useful.

Need more advice?

Tom Hollingsworth wrote a number of blog posts on blogging (is that meta-blogging?):

• Nobody cares
• Write like the wind
• Just write