Monday, August 08, 2005
Blog Pet-Peeve: Tell Me Who the Heck You Are!

Here's a thing that bugs me like no tomorrow: When you are writing a blog, tell me who the heck you are!

I just went on Google to find someone with knowledge about a specific technology and found someone's blog who wrote very well and knowledgable about the subject I was interested in. "Cool!", I thought, "I am going to send this person an email and offer them some money for content we can use for CoDe Magazine...". But no! No name to be found anywhere. The author had apparently thought long and hard about coming up with a cool name for the blog and in the process completely eliminated his name off the thing.

Guess what: I will now send my money to a different author who had his name and email address on his blog. I am sure the first guy will get less spam than person #2, but he also does less business.

I seem to have similar problems all the time. Just the other day, I remembered that someone had written about a certain topic in his blog, so I opened up my RSS reader and tried to find his feed in my lengthy list of subscriptions. But no mention of his name in the blog name! Argh! Before I was able to find his feed, I lost interest and he lost business.

What a stupid reason to miss out on business, publicity, fame, or whatever it is you are trying to achieve with a blog. I mean, if people do not want to be out in public, then why have a blog?!? Doesn't this defeat the very purpose?