Illustrating a concept through stories and anecdotes makes an article more interesting and more likely to be read. But it is a tactic that is fraught with risk and can, at times, flirt with deception.

To begin with, a story is obviously fiction and you can make up whatever you want to. This means that you also hand a licence to believers in the opposing view to create their own stories which end differently. So a person who believes in quick-and-dirty coding can make up a story where careful planners starve to death while the risk-taker wins and lives happily ever after.

Also, stories can be pretty condescending. The worst examples I have come across are the Ken Blanchard books like “Who Moved My Cheese?” and other imitators. The writer has an agenda and he/she manipulates the shallow characters in the book to further it. Few non-fiction writers have the skill to develop a compelling story and meaningful characters. An example to the contrary being “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt.

Anecdotes are, at least (or hopefully), truthful. But every such tale represents a single data point. They do not tell the whole story. They lend themselves to cherry-picking and presenting a view completely opposite to reality. Writers need not be malicious to do this; only the incidents that promote their ideas may stay in their memory.

One legitimate use of anecdotes is debunking a generalized statement. For example, if someone says, “X is always true” and you remember an incident to the contrary. But this one application is usually exploited to create FUD. We see that in newsrooms, where although the crime rate is declining, crimes are reported as though there is a huge crisis.

Since writers, including me, like to use stories and metaphors because it makes our writing richer, readers have to be on alert. Writers themselves may be true believers in something and may not realize how they are trying to manipulate their readers.

I have been noticing the reduced frequency of many bloggers that I follow. Perhaps the pervasive use of Twitter has contributed to this, because what used to be a post is now a Twit. This is perhaps a good thing as it raises the quality of the average blog post. But at the same time, it moves the attention of the blogger away from writing longer posts, the cycle feeds on itself and the frequency keeps going down.

Writing, like other creative activities, requires momentum. You cannot just turn it on and off. The more you write, the more you are inclined to write. If you stop for sometime, it is harder to restart the process. They talk about writer’s block. It is much more difficult when you haven’t written anything for a while.

Another problem is that when you have a gap, there is an added pressure of producing something of higher value than usual. Perhaps like an actor who took a break and wants to pick a movie that is sure to become a hit. This means further delay as the selection process continues ad infinitum. On the other hand, if one is writing frequently, there will be good ones and bad ones, and you are generally more concerned with the process than the outcomes.

One aspect specific to writing about software development is that after a while of writing, you get a sense of déjà vu, as you go over the same ground and topics. Sometimes, it also seems that you are beating the same point to death. Part of keeping it interesting is to be able to keep a broader mind and keep looking at new developments and ideas.

Obviously, software development is a highly innovative field, but a lot of the innovation is in the tools such as languages and frameworks. The overall process of managing software development doesn’t change so quickly. And it shouldn’t, really, because it would mean an unstable working environment with the managers trying the latest management fad. That partly contributes to some of the repetitive themes in blogs.

And of course, life happens. Writing a blog is generally a labor of love for most people who are not paid to do it and don’t have ads (like this one). And you do it juggling time between work and family, snatching a few extra minutes at the start or end of the day or during a weekend. Sometimes, there is not enough to juggle.

Well, I didn’t know exactly how early he wrote his posts. Today (well, actually NOT today – read on), Raymond provides the stunning answer, which seems to be anywhere from 12 months to 18 months. Amazing!

To give you an idea of how far in advance I write my blog entries, I wrote this particular entry on February 13, 2008. Generally, the articles are published in the order I wrote them; this particular entry ended up on February 27, 2009 because that was the next available open day. If the big news topic of February 27th, 2009 happens to be related to this entry, it’s just a coincidence. […]

Oh, and right now, the queue is full up through the beginning of June 2010.

And here I was thinking Raymond Chen probably wrote his posts once a week or so. This blogging behavior is obviously impossible to imitate for most blogs, especially if the blog author is expanding on the latest news item. Nor does it even sound human especially in the age of Twitter and real-time virtual conversations among masses.

It all seems so surreal. Taking an example from physics, it is like Raymond Chen is on a planet one light year away (and further receding from Earth) and he is posting an article right now. So he wrote his article one year ago, I respond today and if he ever reads this post and bothers to reply, it will take me at least 1.5 years to know if he cared. Spacetime in action in the blogosphere.

Because of this revelation, I don’t think Raymond considered readership as a criteria for his 7 am timing. If all your posts are evergreen topics not affected by current topics, there is hardly anything to be gained by a specific timing such as being the first person to show up in the blog reader.

As for my posts, I have never scheduled (never been able to schedule) anything more than 2 days in advance. When I get too much time to burn, I tend to write longer posts. So I can never write more than 3 posts at a stretch. Usually the first post would be posted immediately (as this will be) and the rest on the subsequent days. Windows Live Writer has made it much easier to schedule posts in recent releases.

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in. […]

Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world. We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge. This is partly true for all journalism, which is, as its etymology suggests, daily writing, always subject to subsequent revision. And a good columnist will adjust position and judgment and even political loyalty over time, depending on events. But a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.

If there is a risk of error with blogging, imagine the risk of micro-blogging, perhaps a hundred times in magnitude. Those innocuous-looking 140-character fields, while useful in many contexts, provide you enough and some more rope to hang yourself with if you succumb to broadcasting every single expression of your emotions, especially those made while in anger or inebriated.

The problem with leaving traces of your in-the-moment feelings on the Internet is that they can be (and frequently are) taken out of context. The author is able to follow the development of a coherent argument from the initial reaction to the final opinion of an event, simply because they are the author and know what they did. But readers frequently land on one of those expressions, especially if they come from a search engine, and see only a part of the story.

The proliferation of blogs and the success of Twitter has increased information overload. This means that traditional methods of having your information consumed by readers (such as using a blog reader) will gradually decrease in significance to people hitting websites randomly or through search engines. Everyone cannot be Robert Scoble and read thousands of posts daily.

So there is a limit to how many blogs (that pump several posts a day) you can read. So for many sites, you will have to control the information you pull through information filters, or you simply visit them on a daily/weekly basis and pick and choose what you read. Just like you would read a newspaper or magazine, you would not read every single page, but choose those articles that capture your attention.

Therefore, although new writing mediums allow you to write more frequently, it doesn’t mean you should go down that route. To avoid readers misunderstand what you say, perhaps this is what you should do:

1. Provide the proper context for any opinion.
2. If your opinion has evolved, then provide links back to previous opinions.
3. Delete opinions that you no longer hold to, or update those posts to reflect your current feelings about the topic.

Unfortunately, this is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to do if you are a prolific author. There is no way you can remember all the posts that you wrote about a specific topic. Blogging software may help you categorize and tag your posts, but it is too ineffective to be useful with a high volume of posts. One workaround is to update a single post about the same topic, but that has several problems of its own, such as loss of readability and lack of clarity about the evolution of thoughts. Some authors have also tried appending UPDATE sections to posts, which perhaps is the best solution under the circumstances.

Of course, the really corrected solution may be to avoid knee-jerk reactions, understand the situation better, do some research, gather facts and then provide a well thought-out opinion. That may be under-utilizing the power of the platform, but it is better in the long run to maintain credibility and consistency.