Slavo Ingilizov

Blogging entered my world about two or three years ago. I remember looking through a book in the student library at AUBG, titled Essential Blogging. I had no idea what the book was about, but looked at what the authors had to say and developed an interest in the topic. I started reading blogs sporadically, not following any of them consistently. Then I found out about RSS and Google Reader. I started filling up the list of my subscriptions and have been reading continuously since then.

I entered the blogging world about a year ago. Blogging was so cool that there was just no way I wasn’t having a blog. So I started one on blogspot.com and posted some student life stuff that no one cared about, including me. This effort failed miserably and I stopped writing, deciding to be quiet until I have something meaningful to share with the world. The next step was when I started a Bulgarian blog with a friend of mine. The goal was to post only humorous and meaningless content, probably in order to be cool.

All this time I was trying to figure out what is the purpose of my blogging and what I want to achieve with it. I started using hosted solutions at first, then read some more about optimizations and interesting things you could do with a self-hosted blog. I did that for both Naliven Bozdugan and the one you are reading right now, changed the templates, included categorization features and bookmarking. But until recently, I had no idea where I’m going and only blogged because I liked it.

Yesterday, thinking about what is the next step that I should take (for this blog), I came to the conclusion I’d been searching. It might have been Seth Godin that brought this to my mind, it might have been Dimitar Nikolov, I’m not sure. But what I realized is that I want to take a stand on issues. I blog, because I need to express my opinion, my mood and my feelings. I need to know what my opinion is. The thing is, a lot less people are interested in me as a person than I wish. So the only thing that would make someone drop by and read what I have to say is my opinion. I saw in this an opportunity to find the person I want to become through writing. There is nothing wrong with blogging about a problem I’m not sure how to solve, just the opposite – I think that writing about uncertainty and controversy would be helpful in making a decision or finding an answer to a question.

The end result of all this would hopefully be a clearer mind for myself, and more interesting content for you. I don’t want to make predictions about how it will turn out, let’s just hope that I am right and everything goes as planned.

Oh, and I need a logo for this blog, but I don’t have any graphic design skills. I also don’t know what would be the general idea of the logo and I haven’t written enough content to be able to tell from that. Ideas are welcome.

A stupid question, I know. Especially after you are already reading this. But I’m fascinated about the fact that so many people I know still don’t read blogs on a regular basis or don’t use RSS or Atom or some other publishing protocol reader. For me, blogs are the primary way to stay informed about what’s happening in my communities, and the main news channel. They are also the easiest way for me to chill out and relax for a minute between two tasks requiring high concentration. A personal opinion on a topic is much more valuable than the 20-times-edited newspage on cnn.com or any other mass news site.

So, since I’m so passionate about this, what blogs do I read? Well, this post is an attempt to summarize a fraction of my Google Reader subscriptions, with explanations of why I read them. Hopefully this would shed some light on the topics I’m mostly interested in nowadays, too. Here’s the list:

47 Hats – Bob Walsh’s advice for independent software vendors (MicroISVs) and startups. Digests of news about the community, events and nice articles from all around.

A Smart Bear – Tagline: Startups + Marketing + Geekery. Jason Cohen, an entrepreneur and his takes on small business

Erik Sink – The definitive guide to the Business of Software.

Hacker News – This is a site that Paul Graham set up to get together a community of developers and provoke discussion about the things shared in the dev community in general. Something like reddit.com/r/programming.

How to Change the World – Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist, currently a venture capitalist, blogging about entrepreneurship, providing tips and tricks.

Joel on Software – One of THE bloggers in the software development community. Former Microsoftie, currently owner of Fog Creek Software, doesn’t write much lately. Launched a developer community site together with Atwood called Stackoverflow. Rare but quality material.

Paul Graham – An angel investor in Silicon Valley. Created the Y Combinator project, writing very valuable essays on investment, especially VC and Angel. See Hacker News.

Seth Godin – the marketing guy. Top marketing blog. Ever.

Friday Reflections – a new storyline and a new thought each Friday. Author is Anand Shah. Unbelievably inspirational.

Coding Horror – comparable to Joel in software development. Jeff Atwood, Joel’s partner in Stackoveflow, again writing for devs. See Joel on Software.

Scott Hanselman – another prominent software development blogger. Lots of info, primary Microsoft.

Scott Gu – The Gu, Scott Guthrie, running the following dev teams in Microsoft – CLR and core .NET libraries, ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS 7, Visual Studio Tools for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and mobile. A must read for every Microsoft dev.

I can say I only listed the MUST ones. Except for those, I’m following about 97 more. Anyone who wants the full list, just drop a line. So what are you waiting for? Publish your list and let me know. What blogs are YOU reading?