Can Blogging Boast Your Career

I read this article which was titled Blogs Essential to a good career, dispute the ludicrous title it was still fairly interesting article. I don't think it is essential but I think it has some advantages to your career but not really in the way his article eludes to.

It's interesting that the article mentions people google potential employees. I can back this up as we do this at the company I work for and it's sometimes it's quite a shock what people put on their blogs and websites and I would put out a word of warning to some people. Your website or blog can sometimes be the first impression of you potential employers will get, so it may be prudent to tone down some of the views and comments. I know this comment is going agaisn't free speech and you should be able to have anything you want on your blog or website but the contents of blogs/web sites can effect employees decision on who they employ

Anyway back on to the subject, these are the main subjects of the arties of similar quality but one of them has a website with some dodgy content or strong opinions on a subject, this could be the deciding factor.

The points I agree with in his article are

1. Blogging creates a network.
3. Blogging is great training.
8. Blogging makes the world a better place.

I think Blogging doesn't create a network because by reading peoples blogs you do get to know people and you may have heard of their/read their opinions on things before you meet them. Also other people discuss opinions put forward on other blogs

I have found writing entries for my blog, very interesting and good training for a number of reasons. The first reason is if I'm not sure what to write about in my blog, I will sometimes think what would I find interesting, this will lead me to look up another article or search for a particular topic, Duck Typing was a good example, I decided to research what it was and then wrote this blog entry

I have also found that you do learn topics better when you sit down to write a blog entry about them. I will often search for some information on the topic. I also believe it takes a greater knowledge to describe something so people with or without knowledge of the subject can understand the post.

Finally I think you think about what you are doing in your job more and look for things to blog about. So I certainly think writing a blog acts as a sort of training.

I also agree that Blogging makes the world a better place. There is a lot of people taking articles and blog entries from other people but without ever returning the favour or passing on their knowledge. I hope that by my writing a blog it helps people to understand problems or just passes on some factual information or perhaps learns how not to write Java code ;-)

I hope that my blog may help people studying for their SCJP exam or people just programming on a daily basis. I am glad to contribute back to the community

I also think that blogs have added a fantastic resource to the internet because blogs, particuarly in programming. Blogs allow people to write about their experiences with certain technologies or problems and give their opinions on topics. This is vastly different from reading an article someone has wrote. An example of this is on the Duck Typing post I did, I found the comments just as useful as the blog entry. I think what I am trying to say is blogs allow people to down their ideas and experiences which can be more useful and powerful than a technical article

So I don't think writing a blog is essential to your career but it could help, of course it does depend what you put in your blog and if other people find it interesting. Is the opposite true, does a bad blog ruin your career, now that's a scary thought