Hello? Is this mic on?

OK, I admit it. I suck at blogging. You’d think that someone who is as prolific a writer as me, and who has a strong opinion on anything and everything would be a great blogger. Unfortunately, I’m still trying to find the magic formula for putting it all together.

Perhaps it’s the fact that blogging is largely spontaneous. Usually, I like to gather my thoughts on a particular subject before I unleash them on the masses. Lord knows, I’ve been burned more than a few times when I have published something without first thinking it through. As a result, thoughts that I really should just “jot down” in a blog entry go unwritten.

Another big problem that I have with blogging is the fact that I have signed so many NDAs. Between all of the NDA material that I read and hear from the MVP program, the RD program and the various beta programs that I am involved with, it is hard to keep straight in my head what I am and am not allowed to talk/write about. That means that before I say anything about anything that I can’t find by Googling, I’ve got to run it by somebody at Microsoft to make sure that it’s ok. At that point, I often lose interest in the matter.

It was much easier to write freely when I wasn’t bound to so much secrecy and could just assume that if I knew about something at all, I had free reign to discuss it. I can’t even imagine how hard it is for many of the folks who work at Microsoft to keep from spilling the beans regarding all of the exciting (but secret) stuff that they work on every day.

Yet another reason why it is tough for me to blog is because a lot of what I do every day concerns dealing with the various cients of my consulting company. For obvious reasons, I keep my thoughts to myself regarding what they do, as well as how and why they do it.

I still get a lot of emails from people asking me how I started ASPSOFT, though, which is why I began writing my “Going Independent” series. I’ve got a lot more war stories to tell on that front, so perhaps I’ll venture more into that on this blog. If I can stop being so jaded regarding the publishing industry, perhaps I’ll write a book on it.

Many of you have mentioned the “death” of angryCoder.com. I prefer to think of it as being in a coma. I have already commissioned a company to give the site design a complete face-lift (eg. better than the sucky layout that the site has been using for the past 5 years), and will be re-launching angryCoder.com sometime over the next couple of months.

As always, I continue to do the things that I’m good at, as well as improve on the things that I am not good at. It is obvious that blogging is here to stay, so I’m determined to find a formula that works for me.