To my mind, the best blogs are really just fancy online newspaper columns.
With the possible exception of the
Molly Bloom-esque
Scoble, I find that most of the
time I'm not as interested in the day-to-day travails of the various people in
my blogroll. Instead, I prefer when bloggers write in longer, more detailed
entries with a specific purpose or message to get across (although it is
possible to
go overboard
on that). It's no surprise, then, that I like bloggers who are
writers of some sort in real life, such as my high-school friend
Jesse who writes a blog and is a
magazine editor in the real world.
However, the one problem that blogs have is that there is no easy way to
declare yourself "on hiatus." Newspaper columns have the luxury of just running
old columns, but there is no good way as of yet to distinguish a blog that's
quiet because the author is on vacation from a blog that's quiet because the
author has lost interest and isn't coming back.
I, myself, have been on hiatus due to a combination of work pressures, book
writing pressures and vacation. Design issues are like buses - none show up for
a long time and then they all show up together. As far as the mythical VB
language reference book goes, I just completed my yearly performance review
where I discovered, to my horror, that one of my goals from last year was
"finish the VB language reference book." We've now got a solid goal of getting
the book out by VSLive! next spring, so I'm having to get my butt in gear
finally and bang this thing out. And after a long dry spell with no vacation,
I'm going on several trips this fall, including one last weekend to New York.
So I guess I'm going to have to just say that things will be slow for a
little while, but still expect to see some output as we go along here...