Hmm, Look At What My Blog Coughed Up - Why Blogging Is Good For IT Professionals

Strange cat metaphores aside, blogs can be very useful tools for IT professionals or anyone, for that matter.

So why should you blog?

Blogs are great ways to warehouse your knowledge in a place (you might have heard of it, ya know, that Internet thing) that is accessible to you from virtually anywhere in the world.

What good does storing your knowledge do for you? Ever come across a problem that you know you've seen before but don't know when or how you fixed it?

If you had blogged about it, you could quickly search your blog using Google or another search tool to find the answer.

Most problems you are likely to encounter in IT, or for most things in life, are ones you've already faced. The ability to quickly find answers to the issues that you face in your job or your hobby will set you apart from those who cannot readily access the same information. That's a big difference between a good support professional and a mediocre once.

How about knowledge ownership. "My data is now in the public domain. Doesn't it lessen my worth if anyone can find out what I know?" you say?

The answer is no. It increases your worth if anyone can see what you know, unless you don't actually know anything, in which case you wouldn't be able to blog about it anyhow, at least not in an intelligent manner.

You can write about every little thing that you know and someone without direct experience would still have a hard time doing what you do in time of crisis.

A plumber's blog might give you the ability to do simpler tasks, but most people don't have the time or energy to try something complicated that is out of their field of experience.

By letting people get a good glimpse into the inner workings of your brain, you become separated from other people in the field that remain behind closed doors.

There are plenty of examples of this already, from an attorney in Florida to a tailor in England.

Weblogs give you the chance to have conversations with people you wouldn't ordinarily meet in life (particular for us computer geeks who tend to be a bit more introverted than the average bear).

I've seen this several times from my blog. Got into a conversation with another IT pro because he blogged about cat litter of all things. My best friend from high school that I hadn't talked to in 9 years contacted me out of the blue because he found my blog.

IT pros that have built up a solid reputation as a blogger can use it as a research tool. Blog about an issue you are having, or a project that you are working on and see what responses you get from readers.

I have had good success with this sort of blogging on a few occasions, most notably with our Blackberry rollout project.

There are many more reasons to blog than this short list and plenty more than I could even think to write about here, but there should be plenty of info above to get those creative juices flowing.

You will get out of your blog what you put into it. Write often about topics that interest you and other similarly interested people will find you. Even if they don't, you will still get all of the other benefits that blogging has to offer.

After all, the internet is much bigger than your brain.