Ludo Sketches

Mark refering Tim Bray‘s conclusion about blogging not being dangerous for your job is asking “why go read a journalist’s article about something when you can get it straight from the horse’s mouth (or blog)?“.

Well, first I don’t pretend to be a writer (unlike Mark who is our lead Technical Writer for Directory Server
and who did a wonderful job with some of the programming guide) and
clearly it takes me some effort to lay down my ideas on paper or a
blog. I usually end up throwing raw technical material, with a little
background and short conclusion rather then a compeling story with
illustrations, anecdots… not mentioning style.
My wife being a journalist,
I perfectly understand the difference between an expert talking it’s
mastered subjects and a writer expressing someone else expertise for a
targeted audience. Writers and journalist have the skills and practices
to adapt their article to different audiences, depending on the values
that need to be passed on, while engineers tend to go for the details
that they find “cool”.
As a result, I believe that we will still need people to write about
what we do for different audiences, as I will keep on relying on Mark’s
skills to describe what our products is doing.