Monday February 13, 2006

A common topic of discussion within Technorati is the audience that we serve. We strive to be of service to both the authors (bloggers) and non-bloggers (the blogosphere's newbie readers) alike as well as the advertisers who help pay us. Being generally focused on more geekly topics, I'm oft reminded that my interests are shared only amongst other "middle aged white guys talking about Ruby on Rails" (hey, I'm not that narrow!), but the blogosphere is deep and wide across topics, locales and other demographics.

Yep, even discounting the excess hype aspect, rails is cool. As a matter of fact, I'm pleasantly surprised with the easy read that Agile Web Development with Rails is. Buy it, it's a great book! Unfortunately, it's kind of an academic interest for me at this point. I actually want to reduce the number of programming languages that we're using at Technorati. While it's great to enable developers to contribute to and consume our service oriented architecture with the languages and frameworks that they are most productive in, there's also a battle against degeneration of standards and practices; the blade cuts both ways. Expertise sharing across different programming environments can be difficult and hiring the polylingual programmer is sufficiently challenging already (did I fail to mention that we're hiring?); simplify by constraining is one of the recurrent themes of AWDR's reference to "convention over configuration." In the case of programming language repertoire, less can be more. Anyway, since I'm the only one at Technorati (that I know of) with a rising enthusiasm for Rails, it's unlikely it'll be in use for work stuff anytime soon, bummer. Meantime, I'm just another white guy talking about ruby on rails... JAWGTAROR.

On the topic of who the bloggers are, it's an ever-unfolding story; Dave's State of The Blogosphere is one snapshot into it. Well, I'll be at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference's session on data oogling The Data Dump: Fun with Graphs and Charts with some more goodies. The Technorati platform has a rich set of data streams to tap, so this should be fun! See ya in San Diego!

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