This is another in a series
of case studies from people I interviewed in 2005 about their blogging efforts.
Now as we move to 2013, I find it interesting to look back at the early days of
business blogging. I will only include cases from people who are still blogging
now. These cases have not appeared on this blog before
When we spoke in 2005, Tim
Jarrett had recently relocated to the east coast in August, 2004. At that time
he left Microsoft where he worked as a Lead Product Manager for business
intelligence and online communities in the Microsoft.com group. Since then he
had been consulting on the business use of blogging and RSS. His blog now says
that he is a software product manager at Veracode.
Tim still writes
the blog Jarrett House North. It is now
on WordPress. Before we spoke he had written about the site name and logo, “The photo in the site logo is not the Jarrett house, or
even a Jarrett house. I took the picture in 1998 or 1999 on the
Manassas battlefield in Northern Virginia. The house is a dwelling that
survived the battle, despite heavy fire. Something about the day and the
picture spoke to me…When I was looking for a new site logo graphic, this one
leapt out at me. I think the appeal of the graphic is a combination of
nostalgia (I took the photo the fall before I left Virginia for business
school) and aspiration (the desire for a house, and a family, that would last
through war, fire, and time).”
Tim started blogging in the summer of 2001 when he
was interning at Microsoft. He had a few motives. First, his family was 3000
miles away, and he needed some way to share with them everything he was
experiencing—and needed someone to talk to. Second, having been fairly
technical until his first year of business school, he needed a new technology
space to explore. And he had been reading Dave Winer's site for years, and had
in fact created a site on one of UserLand's servers more than a year earlier.
Tim felt that the summer offered the perfect time to dive in and explore the
technology and start doing something with the site.
Third, he wanted to stay current in technology topics
that were outside his business curriculum, and felt having a public forum in
which he was voicing opinions or posting as he learned would be a good
incentive to learn. Fourth, he also wanted to give some of his friends and
former coworkers an idea of what life inside business school was like.
When we spoke in 2005, the blog had far and away
exceeded all Tim’s expectations. First, within a month of starting to blog, he
found himself becoming part of a blog conversation with Dave Winer and others
about the spread of some underlying blogging technologies into the new Apple
Mac OS X operating system. That led to his becoming, first, an independent
script developer and producing some tools that made it easier to blog from OS
X, and second, an application developer. He actually wrote a little blogging
client, called Manila Envelope, that made posting to his blog much easier. Tim
had been a developer in his former life as an IT consultant, but here he was
not only learning a new operating system and language, but thinking about
distribution, user help, beta management, and a bunch of other things he had
never really had to deal with before. It was illuminating, and it was all from
the blog.
Since then, Tim has become an authority in a couple
of subjects, including business applications of RSS and blogging, in much the
same way--by getting into conversations on and offline and by publishing
original thinking in the area.
Regarding his personal objectives, the blog allowed
Tim to continue to stay in contact with his extended family; it's also led to
old friends rediscovering him, to Tim becoming a connection point for former
classmates, and in at least four or five cases it's inspired other friends to
start blogging.
By its nature, then, when we spoke in 2005 Tim’s blog
had always been personal rather than about a company or connecting with
customers. Over the years since, the purpose has morphed a little bit. When he
was at Microsoft, for instance, he blogged information about how Windows users
should respond to security issues. He also expanded his focus a bit to talking
about the business and cultural issues around technology, particularly
blog-related technologies like blogs and RSS.
Tim also started to set objectives around his own
writing and creativity. A while ago, in a post, he laid out the following
explanation of why he posts:
"I don’t point to things unless I have something
to say about them. They could make me mad; make me laugh (not as often as I’d
like); make me say 'This is really cool'; or tickle a connection with something
else I’ve read, said, or thought. The last is my favorite category of blogging
material—it’s where I can actually add value as a blogger."
In 2005 Tim had also decided to use the blog to think
more deeply about music. He had a deep CD collection--almost a thousand--and was
a rabid digital music listener as well. But until he started writing about
music, he didn't think too deliberately about why he liked some kinds of music
and not others. After a while writing concert and music reviews on his own, he
joined a group blog called BlogCritics that's circulated some of his music
writing through an online network of newspaper web sites, as well as on his own
site and the BlogCritics site.
Tim had become interested in photography through
meeting and reading photobloggers, and it had started to become an important
aspect of his site as well.
When we spoke, the two biggest challenges were
keeping the line between the blog and his private life, and managing the
blog-work relationship. Tim found that it's very tempting once you become a
blogger and get the spirit of sharing to write down everything that's happening
to you. Tim feels that if you're single, that's maybe OK (though there can
certainly be some things about your private life that you are OK sharing at the
age of 20 but might not want to be Googleable when you're 30). But when you're married,
as Tim is, he feels that your spouse has a right to expect a certain amount of
privacy and to get a certain consideration about what gets exposed in public
and what doesn't.
With respect to work, there were all sorts of issues.
Intellectual property was one. Tim points out that your workplace may claim
ownership of ideas that you have. How does that affect blogging? He documented
his blog and his existing software as an exception to the intellectual property
agreement he signed with Microsoft, but he felt constrained in what he wrote
afterwards--especially in talking about the company or its policies. This was a
year or two before Robert helped to define the culture of blogging at Microsoft
-- that it was OK to have a blog and talk about your team and what it was
doing. Tim talked about RSS, because at that point the company wasn't doing
anything in the space, or about things he was learning on his own about CSS and
web design, and then he blogged a lot about music, food, beer, and home
improvement. It was only after a year had passed that he even publicly said,
"I work for Microsoft" on his blog.
Tim felt it was very liberating to realize after a
while that there were other people at Microsoft who were able to maintain that
balance and still write good interesting technical things on their blogs. That
freed him a bit to have a stronger voice about software matters.
Ultimately, Tim got full liberation by joining a
group whose business was about building community--customer-to-customer and
Microsoft-to-customer relationships. He had done work with an early version of
that team as an intern, thinking about how Microsoft should work with
customer-run websites that talked about its products and how to encourage those
sites. At the end of his Microsoft experience, he came full circle, this time
helping the company build a service that would take employee weblogs and weave
them into the corporate website--effectively blurring the line between
employees' perspectives on their products and corporate messages. This became
the Microsoft Community
Blogs.
Tim had a couple streams of content that combine on
his blog, including items that he finds in his RSS subscriptions. In 2005 he
subscribed to about 360 syndicated feeds and tried to read (or at least scan)
everything that's new in them at least once a day. That's how he kept up with
developments in RSS or blogging practice, with new developments in the software
field, with news stories that he was interested in, and with the other bloggers
he read. As we mentioned above, Tim tried to post things from the feeds he read
where he can add context or offer a strong opinion.
A second source for Tim was his life
experience--things like photography expeditions, concerts, cooking, etc. He
tries to write about things in his life that are fun, really frustrating, or
that provide some context to what's going on with him.
Tim hoped people came to his blog to learn something,
to laugh, or to get in an argument with him. He didn't want people to passively
consume what he wrote; he wanted them to challenge what he said and to help him
grow in how he thought about things. Tim noted that he also wanted them “to
marvel at the limpid prose and phenomenal photography, but I am not holding my
breath on that front.”
Tim benefited from reading other blogs. He found that
often times other writers had a perspective on a topic in which he was
interested that he hadn't thought about—either because he was starting from an
opposing point of view or because they had some background that he didn't
possess.
In 2005, Tim had the following advice for others
thinking about starting a blog:
First, if you're doing blogging in a business context
you need to think about a very few important things: how tolerant are my
employers of me saying things that might not jibe with corporate messaging? and
is it appropriate for me to write about what I'm doing? (Cases where the latter
is an issue: startups during the quiet period; if your entire job is working
with clients, especially difficult ones; etc.). Then dive in afterwards, as
long as you remember Scoble's rules, which basically boil down to: would I have
a problem if my wife, my boss, or my CEO reads this post?
Second, remember what Ted Hughes said about Sylvia
Plath's poetry, which was that if she couldn't get a table from the materials
she was working with in a poem, she would be happy with a chair or a toy. Not
every post has to be hit out of the ballpark, but you always need to do the
best job you can with the material you have at hand.
Third, link to people on both sides of an issue, not
just the ones you agree with.
Fourth, if you read something interesting on
someone's blog, point to it and write why you think it's interesting.
