There’s a comment on a recent post I made of Ajaxian’s predictions for 07 from a nice fellow by the name of Steve that reads as follows:

Aaron, I would imagine that the majority of people who read your blog also read Ajaxian. I can understand aggregating interesting posts from across the web and adding one’s own commentary, etc., but seriously, your blog is little more than a mirror of a random selection of Ajaxian posts. On the other hand, I’m actually interested in the occasional stuff you write that isn’t ripped wholesale from Ajaxian.

First, I’ll note that I always attribute posts like these to the source from which it came; I’m not trying to take credit for this stuff. But why do it? As Steve points out, most people who read my blog probably also read Ajaxian, too.

This blog, Clientside, was originally an internal-only blog for CNET. When I first started it, my objective was to help evangelize clientside technologies to other developers here at CNET. A lot of these people don’t read Ajaxian or the other blogs. Not because they aren’t interested but rather because they have other priorities.

Take someone like a senior server-side java developer who has a moderate interest in all things ajax/javascript/etc. This person is busy reading about application servers and serlets and all sorts of other technologies that they have to stay on top of. Adding javascript to that mix isn’t really going to happen.

So if you can’t bring the person to the mountain, bring the mountain to them. I set up a mailing filter in wordpress so that people can get an email when I post. This makes it so that these developers don’t have to remind themselves to come back and check my blog for new entries, or add my RSS to their crowded readers. So when I post something from Ajaxian, it’s because there are people here, at CNET specifically, who probably haven’t read it.

That said, I’m very curious if this is still useful to those of you who are actually getting emails from this blog. If it’s not useful for me to post about what Ajaxian has up (that I find interesting and applicable to our work here), then I’ll stop doing it.

As a side note, I haven’t been posting a lot lately because I’ve been heads down on a huge javascript project (basically rewriting all of the javascript on CNET and Download.com – fun!), but I have numerous things in the work for you all, including more tutorial content and new javascript classes and widgets that I’ll post about in the new year.

Aaron

This entry was posted on Monday, January 1st, 2007 at 12:11 pm and is filed under 'Industry' News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.