Well it's quite a good week to be focusing on one of my favorite subjects – promoting professional geekery, the idea that people can (and in many cases) should turn what they love into a career.  It's "Speak Out With Your Geek Out" and let me focus on #4: Starting The Damn Blog.

Why not just Starting The Blog?  Because you (and others) have thought about a blog so often that it's not just "the blog I want to start" it's "the damn blog I should get to."

So, start it.

Why should you do it?  Because if you want to promote professional geekery, it's one of the best ways to do it beyond becoming an insanely famous role model.

A blog focusing on your progeekery/profan/protaku focus does the following:

• It gives you a place to write down your knowledge so people can read it and find it (which is kind of obvious, but still)
• It lets you create a long-term record of advice, information, analysis, and good ideas (or bad ideas, which are also educational).  All that writing lasts. and can help people for ages.
• It forces you to choose a focus for your blog so you decide on what to discuss – making it nicely niched (hopefully).  This promotes your progeekery in a nice focused manner.
• It makes you a better writer and communicator about the subjects you care about and about being a progeek.
• It can become a cooperative effort by adding more people.  This lets you expose people to more ideas, viewpoints, and role models.
• It lets you meet folks via the comments – always good to find new allies in your quest to be a professional geeky.
• It can act as a home base for other projects like books, groups, and more.
• You can add all sorts of features like useful links, news feeds, widgets, etc.
• It will teach you discipline and use of your time.

Best of all?  It's insanely easy to do:

• Go to http://www.blogger.com/, http://www.typepad.com/, or http://www.wordpress.com/ and start a blog.  There, done.
• Want to host your own?  Go to http://www.dreamhost.com/ and check out there deals.  There, done . . . again.

The services, templates, etc. out there give you everything you need to be blogging in short order.  If you map things to a domain, then you can always change hosts software, etc. with little or no interruption.

By the way – that's a hint to get your own domain.

So join the blogging crowd, share your progeekery, and build the future.

- Steven Savage