I’ve realized that I’ve got a couple of problems with blogging regularly. Maybe you can help me to do something about it.
The first issue is that I don’t really like to publish unpolished material in a blog. The draft mechanism handles that, to some degree. I have less of a problem with that if there’s a strong sense of mission about the material that I’m publishing–so writing magazine articles under contract and deadlines, with help from reviewers and editors, is a little easier for me.
A bigger problem is that I seem to have trouble getting traction if I’m not writing in response to something specific. If I’m merely musing or journaling, I have a lot less motivation than if I’m answering a question.
Johanna Rothman suggested to me at one point that Myers-Briggs Es (the extraverts) sometimes have a hard time with writing things that they’ve already said. Once it’s out, it’s out, and our temperaments incline us not to repeat ourselves. Or perhaps, more accurately, we Es don’t like talking without a live audience with whom we can engage, where the Is (introverts) can live and even thrive without that form of feedback. In the mailing lists, people ask plenty of questions that engage me, and I’m energized to answer them. So another way I might address this issue is that I might take questions that I’ve been answering in the comp.software.testing mailing list, or in Agile Testing, and either link to them or reproduce the salient points here.
James Bach had the most interesting approach to solving this problem, so I’m extending the same invitation as he did: please ask me a question via email, and I’ll answer it in a blog entry. (I’m happy to answer questions even if you’d like to remain anonymous.) That allows us to have a conversation, instead of me feeling like I’m merely spouting–and maybe we can solve some problems together along the way.