Lazycoder

So I’ve had more than one person tell me that I don’t really have a blog. Some people called it a link blog, other people said it’s just a site but it’s not a blog. This confused me. I’ve been doing … whatever it is I’m doing here for about 10 years. Which is usually about 6 years longer than anyone else on the web. I saw a couple of sites posting stories daily/weekly and decided to emulate them. Writing my own code in classic ASP and then porting it to PHP. Later I bounced from LiveJournal to a tiny service no one else was using called “Blogger”. Eventually I installed my own blogging engine, choosing a tiny PHP based engine called B2. Eventually, B2 would be taken over by Matt Mullenweg and be re-written and re-named to Wordpress. That seemed to work out pretty well for everyone. I bought the lazycoder.com domain back in 2000, so I’ve been posting here for about eight years. I ran Geeklog for a while here before re-installing Wordpress. I was posting here about .NET and ASP before weblogs.asp.net was taken over by Microsoft and before blogs.msdn.com was even online.

So I know a thing or two about “blogging”.

I post what I hope are informative, thoughtful articles/posts/stories on a semi-random basis. They may be long or short. I point to other peoples articles in my posts or via my Del.icio.us account that automatically posts my saved links.

So my question is: If this isn’t a blog, what is it? What defines a blog?

Is this a matter of people defining “blog” in terms of traffic or exposure? Is blogging still just a big popularity contest? Who has the most comments/page hits? Who got a big name or a big site to link to them? Maybe the underlying point that these people don’t want to admit is that blogging is dead. It’s been taken over by big media. There is, and always has been, a HUGE amount of quid pro quo in the blogging world. it’s really kind of sick. Trading links, trading content (”I’ll post about your post if you mention product x”). I’ve managed to avoid all that, mostly because people ignore me due to my low traffic.
So if you are just starting out blogging, you may have a lot of people tell you that you aren’t “doing it right”. You can choose to either listen to them or not. I don’t have a specific goal for this … whatever it is … other than to work on my communication skills and to propagate ideas on to the web. But remember: history is written by the victors.

Microsoft announced its cloud computing service, Azure, today at PDC 2008. At first glance, it looks like the Google Applications Engine using .NET languages. It follows the same kind of pricing model as GAE did when it launched. During the CTP, you get so much usage for free and once you hit a cap, you pay for the resources your application uses. Once the full service is launched, you pay for the resources your application consumes. Hopefully there will still be a certain amount of free usage.

This is another me-too cloud service, but in my opinion you can’t have too many options in the marketplace. Hopefully, the three services will be competitive in terms of price and features. Amazon EC2 is basically just an instance of Windows or Linux, so you can run whatever you want on your instance. GAE limits you to Python and maybe Java in the future. Azure is limited to .NET languages right now, but I bet that IronRuby and IronPython will be making their way to the platform.