The Spirit of TunedIT

Some time ago I spoke to a friend of mine, Paweł Szczęsny from the Polish Academy of Sciences – a biologist, a visionary of Open Science and a pioneer of scientific blogging. When I mentioned about our plans to start a blog for TunedIT, Paweł, after giving it a serious thought, had come up with the following advice: „Remember one thing: do not write about yourself. If someone writes about oneself, the blog becomes terribly boring. Only if you keep writing about something different, it has a chance to be interesting”.

At first, this tip of advice seemed illogical to me – what’s the point in opening a blog related to the web portal TunedIT, if we are to write about something totally different? All in all, this is so natural: if a new functionality comes up on TunedIT, we will mention it in the blog: „Today a new functionality has been released, which enables … it helps in … you can use it like this …” and so on. If there’s going to be a new competition: „Today we’re launching a new competition … the task is to …” Isn’t it the way you do it? Each of us could instantly list a long series of blogs where similar posts can be encountered. Don’t they sound so familiar, so natural, so conventional, so … banal? Hm, wait a moment. Banal? Actually, … Have I read many blogs like that? Sure! A lot! How many of them have I read further than to the second sentence of the paragraph? I can’t recall any… So maybe writing about yourself is not the best choice for your blog, in fact? But if not, what else then makes it tick? Read more of this post