Why is the 'contact' link hidden on the left side of this blog?
I have been getting a lot of questions asking for help with Exchange & Outlook via the contact link (or comments) on this blog. I have been doing my best for several months to answer them or get answers to them, but lately I have decided that it's taking too much of my time. I've participated in newsgroups and mailing lists for Exchange & Outlook for years, and I've rarely gotten person email as a result of my posts/emails. Of course there are many differences between blogging & those forums - the posts aren't archived by google for all to see for years to come, there are other people in those forums to help with future questions, etc. Also, since I would only respond to questions on the mailing lists/NGs to which I knew the answers, even if I did get a personal email, there was a good chance it was on a topic with which I was very familiar. Whereas with this blog, I tend to get emails across a wide variety of issues related to Outlook & Exchange, although I only have expertise in certain areas.
So anyway, this is the first time I've ever had to worry about this:
#1: It takes a lot of time to do this, either just responding to the email (and the occasional back-and-forth if the response didn't help or the original question wasn't clear), or researching the answer, or forwarding it to someone else (in which case I still act as a 'call router' which still takes time).
#2: Since the answer is stored in email, it's only benefiting one person. Occasionally I will take the answer and post it on my blog (as I just did last week with this entry), so that's one workaround to this.
As a temporary stopgap, I hid the contact link on the left (although the page itself is still there for now) until I figure out what I want to do. I'm really not happy about doing this since I have really been enjoying the feedback I've gotten through it, but I need to prioritize - I don't get paid to blog, and I figure it's better that the email link is hidden versus it being visible, people sending me email, and me not responding or responding with an automated “Thanks for your mail, I may not respond.“ which just seems bogus to me.
This goes back to: why do I blog? I blog because I feel that I have useful information to share and I enjoy sharing it with my customers. I blog because I like knowing that I am helping people - the google search results are an implicit positive feedback, plus comments like “This is exactly what I was looking for“ really make my day. I blog because I want to 'open the kimono' about how things work at Microsoft and in my team and in software development in general. My six years have been eye-opening for me (and I'm still learning on a daily basis), and I want to share what I've learned.
So for now, I hid the contact link until I can figure out what I want to do. I am leaning towards unhiding it and changing the contact form so that it is not an “email me with questions/comments” type of form, but rather so that it is a “Submit a suggestion for me to blog about” form (kudos to .Text for the nicely customizable CSS). Also, I will be adding links to the form to other community forums such as mailing lists & newsgroups for Exchange, those are better places to ask questions. I will probably be doing the same thing for the Exchange blog.
I hope that this will help set expectations about my responses to comments or email via this blog, and I hope that this isn't seen as me closing a door or discouraging anyone from commenting on a post. I'm still here, I'm still listening and I still read everything I get via the blog, in comments or in email - I just can't promise that I will respond. Even responding to say “Sorry, I don't know” takes time, and I have work and a family that I have to prioritize higher. I hope this is understandable.
Comments
- Anonymous
May 03, 2004
How about a Wiki??? - Anonymous
May 03, 2004
The "Submit a suggestion for me to blog about' seems like a grand idea. Makes the "answers" and "suggestions" more openly available to readers. Go for it KC ! - Anonymous
May 04, 2004
That is absolutely reasonable KC. A few years ago I was actively participating in many SW developer communities just because I could and I loved it. Then I ended up with answering tech questions at 11PM. Wrong! :) - Anonymous
May 13, 2004
What about putting in a forum for those Q&As? - Anonymous
May 23, 2004
Since the Microsoft Newsgroups are web based, why not put several "Contact" links on your page? One "Questions on Outlook" that links to the web based Outlook news group. Another that is for "Questions on Exchange" that links to that newsgroup, etc. etc.