Blogs Make You Smarter

I've been amazed over the last year how much I learn on a daily basis because of blogs and RSS. Information is poured into my RSS reader and it's so easy to browse the topics and read the interesting items. As another example, a co-worker today told me that they clicked over to David Catalano's blog from my blog and posted a comment; David saw the comment and emailed the co-worker and asked if they would like to borrow the book. Now the co-worker is going to read the book. Not only did they learn something from the blog, but now they are going to read a great book!

Ten years ago I was similarly amazed by how much smarter the Internet was making people. Every morning you could quickly browse your favorite news sites quickly and easily. People could email you information instantly, newsgroups always had great information based on topic, and I haven't even mentioned Google yet. I believe blogs and RSS have taken the power of the Internet to the next level and most "normal" people still have no clue what blogging and RSS is all about; so it will only get more useful as the masses understand and adapt the technology.

We were discussing today creative ways to find more potential developers for our team. Being in SWVA we have to be creative to find great people, and the idea of searching blogs for candidates came up for discussion. I think it would be a great idea for Monster to buy a blogging company. If all resumes came with a link to their blog it would provide so much more value than a bland old resume. If I get a stack of 50 resumes they all start looking alike around resume 17, but the one or two that have links to their blog always stand out in my memory.