Lately, I’ve felt a bit alone in The World of what’s new, cool and wonderful. If you’ve been following the Web 2.0 blogs lately, you know what I’m talking about. I feel like everybody is talking a language I don’t understand and as the minutes pass the gab widens. Yet, somehow I don’t feel I’m missing out on anything important. It’s an ambiguous feeling about a choice between learning the language or not.

If I jump on the bandwagon and try to learn the language, I will no more feel distanced from The World. It would be like a new chapter in the blogosphere will open up to me and let me in on the ever so wonderful discussions about the newest coolest things.

If I choose not to seek the wonders of The World, then what? Will it impact my professional life in any way or is it more social by nature? If it is a social experiment, what would the benefits be for the outsider that isn’t active looking for a new World? Of my relative insignificant understanding of addiction, this would qualify.

Ruby, SOA and AJAX are just some of the acceptable subjects in The World of relative few acceptable subjects. And that is despite of the already long lifetime of each of them, but somehow that doesn’t matter to the residents of The World. They seem to be two steps behind and proud of it.

Even though most developers have used the same tools - as The World now dictates - for several years, it still seem that we don’t use them enough to be fully accepted. In that perspective we are left with a difficult choice. Should we continue to use the tools or should we continue to use the tools and tell The World that we do in order to get accepted?

The developer community has gotten big on the Internet the last couple of years – very big. New blogs are constantly adding value to the blogosphere which seem to grow by the second. There is no doubt in my mind that this trend is a bonus for us developers, because we can now find multiple solutions to almost every problem we face in our daily professional life.

 

Being a .NET developer I subscribe to a lot of .NET related sites like DotNetKicks and ASP.NET, but also the more broad developer sites like dzone, Digg/programming etc. I really enjoy reading non .NET related things as well because it puts various topics in perspective.

 

However, today at Digg/programming, not one single topic involved .NET. There were a lot of PHP, Ruby and Java. So where is .NET? Why is .NET so under represented on the broader community sites? I don’t think it is because PHP or Java has a bigger user base or is better or worse than .NET. It must be something else. Maybe it is because .NET developers just don’t care about the other programming languages and platforms. That’s fair enough, but I don’t buy it.

 

Could it be because .NET developers don’t feel as strongly about their choice of platform as the rest? They are happy with Visual Studio, they can find what ever they need from the Internet and that’s it. They don’t feel the urge to go tell the world about all the wonderful features and possibilities of .NET. They just use it and feel happy about it.

 

Another reason could be that .NET devs are not as likely to jump on the Web 2.0 wave of social bookmarks, RSS and other such sharing technologies. They are maybe not aware of the possibilities in the new Internet and as such are more likely to be more passive users.

 

Either way, this is bad. Fellow .NET’ers go promote, go write blog posts and article on .NET related goodies and make a presens on the broad community sites. We can’t and won’t beat the rest of the community, but we can do better than we do now.