Definition of a Blogger

2010-03-12 19:17
While at lunch yesterday the topic of what Bloggers do, how they earn money and most important of all - what the hack a blogger really is - came up. Well, some criteria those who went to a restaurant nearby came up with the following criteria:


  • Blog is read by more than 5 people. (Well, in my opinion a very low barrier, really.)
  • Bloggers tend to get invited to give talks at conferences. (Yeah, well, not only people with blogs get those invitations?)
  • Over time bloggers tend to get contracts, do consultancy and the like to earn money. (Hmm, yeah, blogs do help to get visibility...)
  • Bloggers tend to be involved with traditional media people. (Phew - finally something that disqualifies myself as a blogger. Though, come to think of it - no having published one or two articles does not count. Period.)
  • They are those people you tend to see in cafes with Mac books surfing the web. (Oh, well, who hasn't done that once in a while?)


Judging from that very unscientific case-study even though taking into account the very informal nature, the result still appeared to be very scary to me: I had fought the temptation of actually creating a blog for years until publishing content for the Hadoop Get Together the very old-fashioned way (vim + scp) became too much of a burden. Now I have to realise that against my own judgement that I do tend to use this blog not exactly particularly seldom. Still trying to avoid to become one of these funny new media types and remain a typical free software developer :)