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I haven’t been updating this blog too much recently. I never meant for this blog to run on a schedule, but I did intend to post more frequently than this. My original idea was that the blog would serve two major purposes. First, it is a place for me to announce new projects or updates to software and websites I’ve already released. It’s done that quite well, though I haven’t had much to announce recently. My job has been taking the majority of my development time, and most of the projects I’ve been working on at home are either private or haven’t been released in the form I’d like to because my employer hasn’t approved them for release yet.

The second major purpose for my blog is as a place for me to record the solution to problems I run across while developing software, so that others won’t have to spend hours Googling or using trial and error to come to the same conclusion. I didn’t intend to rehash things that were easily found or that had already been discussed - only to post when I felt it was something that added value to the internet that hadn’t been there before. So a lot of the blog posts are not really a narrative or running commentary - they’re not meant to be subscribed to, but found individually. It’s for this reason that my most popular posts tend to include the exact text of error messages. This type of post has suffered both because I haven’t been doing as much development, because I can’t discuss a lot of what I’ve learned due to the nature of the projects I’m working on, and because I’ve been learning new stuff (like Ruby on Rails) and haven’t done enough to have solved problems others haven’t already posted solutions for.

The third reason I have this blog is to occasionally talk about my thoughts on different technical topics, from web development to video games. Again, I don’t like to make a post unless I think I’m adding something new, and most of the topics I’ve wanted to talk about have already been covered. I had a lot of draft posts sitting around about web development, web standards, and the evolution of browsers, but then I discovered Alex Russell’s blog and it turns out he’s already said most of what I wanted to say, and better than I could. Other stuff, like my impressions of Windows Vista, critique of stackoverflow.com and suggestions for the Xbox Live Arcade lineup, have been covered to my satisfaction in plenty of places. Maybe some of them will end up posted, but probably not.

Another part of the reason I haven’t posted much is the sheer weight of unfinished posts I have. Right now I have 64 drafts and only 52 real posts! So I’m going to attempt to clear things out by writing a little about what I haven’t posted. A lot of this stuff wasn’t posted because it fell under that third point above, but some of it I was just too lazy to flesh out into real posts. Some of it’s just random stuff. So here’s what’s been happening in the last year:

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It seems these days that everyone has a blog (or two). There are big news blogs, little blogs with useful articles (such as the many C# blogs I read), the countless teenagers with MySpace or livejournal blogs. There are blogs about tech, politics, clothing… there are even blogs about blogging! Even I have been sucked into the blogging scene. Even my Xbox 360 has a blog. So why shouldn’t my hedgehog have a blog?

So that’s what I did. Right after we got Pliny and got him set up with a nice cage and a big wheel, I started thinking about how I could get him to blog. I thought about teaching him how to type and operate Wordpress, but as cute as he is, he’s not very smart. So I took the technological route. I built a little sensor out of a magnet and a reed switch and attached it to his wheel. After about 4 months of on-off (mostly off) C# coding, I had a client built up that would poll the sensor, log Pliny’s wheel activity, and post to his blog. The Hogblog was born! It posts his activity, along with charts and occasionally a pic from Flickr. It’s all automatic, and I’m subscribed to his RSS feed to find out just how much running he’s been doing while I was asleep. It’s already brought up some interesting information. For two days his wheel was stuck - the little log he sleeps in was jammed up against it. In the two days since he’s run almost half a mile!

This has been a really fun project that has tied together a lot of fun aspects - playing with physical elements like the sensor, coding in C# (and interacting with the parallel port to get the stats!), and making web services calls to Wordpress and Flickr. I’m already thinking up more ways to improve his blog, but for now I’m going to sit back and watch for a bit!

I just heard an interview with Robert Scoble on KUOW (Seattle’s NPR station). I’ve been reading Scoble’s blog for a long time, and I have agreed with most of the things he’s said over the years about the importance of blogging for companies in a world where word-of-mouth can spread a story around the world in minutes. Specifically, I agree that transparency and the “naked conversations” (as the title of Scoble’s book puts it) are beneficial to both the customers of a company like Microsoft but also to the company itself - they recieve feedback and can keep bad spin from igniting the blogosphere (ugh, I can’t believe I just used that word) like a brush fire.

However, I have a big question for Scoble and the other corporate blogging proponents. What about Apple? Apple doesn’t blog at all as far as I know - even Dave Hyatt’s old Safari blog is long gone. Yet people hang on their every word, every product announcement. Even the completely uninteresting launch of the new Intel Mac mini and iPod Hi-Fi was talked about all over the place - I got sick of tabbing through people repeating the story in my RSS reader. Engadget and some other tech blogs had a posts for weeks before the keynote buzzing about the magical products that might be released. You couldn’t hope for better PR. And even after the disappointing keynote, people still had positive things to say, despite some worrying problems with the new Mac mini (I admit, I was stoked to buy an Intel Mac mini when they came out, but I think I’ll reconsider for the time being).

When I interviewed at Apple I asked them why they didn’t blog, why there wasn’t more transparency. They responded that secrecy and surprise are one of Apple’s biggest assets, which I completely understand. But I don’t see Apple employees blogging about Carbon, or Automator, or any of the cool things that people aready know about, the same way I see Microsoft employees blogging about .NET or Microsoft Gadgets. What I’d love to have explained to me is how a company can survive, or rather, be loved so thouroughly, completely, and perhaps irrationally, without the level of transparency Scoble prescribes. Is it that blogging doesn’t really help the way we hope it does, or that it only helps for new companies and companies that already start out reviled by much of the community such as Microsoft?

Update (3/29/06): Scoble and Shel Israel came and gave an enjoyable talk today, and I got to ask them a version of the question I had posted above. I wish I could have talked with them further, but they basically said that while Apple is a PR powerhouse now, their lack of transparency will bite them in the long run. I tend to agree with that, but I think right now blogging is significantly more necessary for companies that don’t have flawless PR or fanatical customers.