Overreacting, IMO

With all due respect, I think that Robert is overreacting just a bit, on several fronts:

Ok so we can't write about:

• Politics
• Personal Stuff
• Observations About Life
• Etc.

I was told that we should only write about code. Well, in a further censorship of the blogging community here, Jesse and Julia think that we shouldn't be able to ask questions of the community in our blogs, or use the contact pages to ask people questions.
[Robert McLaws]

FWIW, I don't think anyone's ever said that you can't write about any of the above topics, or that you shouldn't communicate with the community about technical stuff. What Scott (remember him, he's the guy who wrote the software that Robert, myself, and over a hundred others use to write our blogs) said is that these blogs should be focused on .NET. That's the whole point of having a community of blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net/. And he also said:

I am fully aware that there is more to life than code. I expect and hope people here will talk about some things that are not .NET, but you have to realize what the focus is here. It is .NET.
[Scott Watermasysk]

I believe the point that Julia and Jesse are attempting to make is that they see the contact form on their blogs as being there so that people can contact them about their blogs, not to open themselves up as a catch-all resource for .NET questions. I think this is a pretty reasonable approach to take

Robert goes on to say:

By blogginghere, you have a responsibility to your community members to help them out. This anti-social mentality will only turn away readers who may learn something from what we all have to say. If you can't handle that responsibility, don't blog. Go back to moderating the Forums and the Newsgroups and let us talk about our experiences.

I think Robert has it a little backwards here. By blogging here about .NET, one is presumably helping out the community. The only obligation, and the one that's set up by Scott himself, is that we blog mainly about .NET. And without denigrating Robert's standing in the community, I'm guessing that he doesn't get as much email as folks like Julia and others do. It's not a question of whether people want to help, or whether they "can't handle that responsibility", as Robert seems to assume. It's a simple matter of how much time someone has in a day.

I would also point out that contrary to Robert's assumption, writing a blog, or otherwise putting yourself out in the community should not be seen, IMO, as an open invitation for people to use you as an individual resource for their development questions. Now if someone emails me with a question about something I blogged about, I have no problem with that whatsoever. That makes perfect sense. But if someone sees that I've got a blog, and sees that I've got a contact link and uses that to ask me a development question unrelated to my blog, I may well direct that person to a public forum where they're more likely to get a good answer quickly, on this and future questions. Perhaps Robert sees this as an abdication of responsibility. I see it as ensuring that that person has a resource for questions that will always be available, and where others can benefit from the answer(s) their question receives.