Thoughts on knowledge blogs and an interview with Tess Ferrandez
And now, after an exciting trip into the world of science blogging, we return to our regular scheduled program.
I’ve been meaning to write something on knowledge blogs (that I’ve previously referred to as expert or industry blogs) as one specific subgenre of corporate blogs for quite a while now. Several recent conversations on the subject have further increased my interest and yesterday I realized that I have been sitting on an exclusive interview with a knowledge blog expert for several months - something that I should absolutely share.
Knowledge blogs are written with the intention of providing insight and information into a topic a company blogger has substantial expertise in. They can be public-facing or have restricted access, but in both cases the target audience is usually a specialized one. A public-facing knowledge blog (or a limited-access blog that allows providing access to affiliates) can be written for customers who seek information and instruction, partners who collaborate in a project, experts at academic institutions, consultants etc. I imagine a typical intranet blog is likely to be more bidirectional than a public-facing one, meaning it is likely to be used for internal communication, partly replacing email, whereas a blog that is accessible to everyone (like the one I’ll present in a moment) is normally used for instruction, making the exchange between blogger and reader more unidirectional.
Software companies like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, SAP and Adobe use public-facing knowledge blogs on a large scale for the purposes mentioned above. The very technical nature of their products makes customer service a largely informational challenge and many of the customers are not end-users, but second-level developers who use specialized development tools to in turn create end-user products.
One extremely successful example of a knowledge blog from the IT sector (and obviously there are many) is If broken it is, fix it you should which is maintained by Tess Ferrandez. Tess is “an escalation engineer in PSS (product support services) at Microsoft, mostly dealing with ASP.NET but anything .NETish works” (from her about page). The application of terms such as “knowledge” and “expert” becomes natural when you take a look at what Tess writes about. To someone not educated in debugging ASP.net applications virtually every sentence in the blog will be completely opaque, but to Tess’ sizable international audience her troubleshooting tips are invaluable.
Independently of whether or not you have a grasp of the subject matter, it becomes apparent quite quickly when reading If broke it is that Tess has a knack for explaining highly complex problems in an accessible way. Another aspect that intrigues me is that she often frames problems in a tone that resembles storytelling - there’s an arc of suspense, from the initial situation (something doesn’t work) to the discovery of the root of the problem and its resolution. Notably this kind of framing is the direct inversion of how issues are presented in a classical knowledge base. Contextual data (e.g. what the engineer thinks or experiences while he is working on the problem) is omitted. There is no sequence of events; instead facts are presented outside of time. For example, compare this entry from Tess’ blog with the knowledge base article it cites. The knowledge base article has no identifiable author (there is no “I”, like there is in the blog) and the sequence of topics does not map to a sequence of events. By contrast, Tess’ debugging examples are narratives; they don’t contain an objectively-detached analysis of a piece of software but the subjective-experiential description of how she approaches, assesses and fixes a problem. We learn by example.
There’s a lot I could write about why I think this is a very promising approach and what it has to do with how we process information, but I’ll save that for another post.
Here are Tess’ answers to 10 questions I asked her via email. I plan to conduct more of these interviews and use them for my thesis, to accurately describe the practitioner’s perspective on corporate blogging.
Once more, I would like to thank Tess for allowing me to interview her.
E-mail interview with Tess Ferrandez
Cornelius: What (if anything) do you enjoy most about blogging?
Tess: I enjoy the instant feedback from people reading the blog, and I enjoy teaching and debugging so blogging is the perfect venue for me to teach debugging and make sure that people don’t have to run into issues that they could easily avoid if they knew about them.
Cornelius: Did someone else encourage you to blog or did you start out of you own accord?
Tess: I started on my own accord, we keep telling customers the same thing over and over in emails and I figured that a) I could avoid having to reinvent the wheel all the time b) other people that don’t call support could benefit from this knowledge and c) if it is documented somewhere people will trust it more since it is something that is already known and not something that was made up to fit the evidence from the dumps.
Cornelius: Do you publish in certain intervals or create a schedule for publication?
Tess: I don’t have a schedule, I blog when I have something that I think is interesting to write about and when I have time to blog. My blog posts are pretty sporadic, one blog post one month and 5 the next.
Cornelius: What prompts you to write a piece?
Tess: When I have had a case that was either extremely interesting or when I find that I see the same issue over and over.
Cornelius: How would you describe your goals when writing a piece?
Tess: My goals are that the posts should be interesting to as many people as possible, so I mostly blog about issues that will affect a lot of different developers. My goals are also that it should be easy to digest while at the same time contain enough detail to be useful, so I structure the content in a way that you can either read it all if you are interested in the details or just read the bottom line if you are just interested in the solution. The primary purpose of the posts are to show common issues and their solutions but also provide debugging tips so that people can resolve similar issues on their own.
Cornelius: Has your employer made any suggestions to you regarding topics that should be avoided (e.g. for legal reasons) or made any suggestions to you on what to blog about?
Tess: Not really, however I avoid four things:
1. Naming customers,
2. Naming 3rd party components
3. Providing information about items that are either confidential or that I know are prone to change to avoid confusion.
These are pretty much the same rules that apply to any communication we have with customers, they expect to be able to trust us so we should not leave out any information about them, and in terms of 3rd party products, if I haven’t tested them myself in a formal way I can’t really expect to be able to express a formal opinion about them.
Cornelius: What kind of reactions do you get from colleagues, clients etc. regarding your blog?
Tess: Only positive, a lot of my colleagues have started blogging after they saw my blog and how many readers I got, i.e. how many people benefit from it, and I have seen a trend of these blogs being very successful.
My blog gets about 100 000 web hits and 400 000 RSS hits a month, and if something I write even helps 1 % of those that would be a good return on investment.
I almost get emails on a weekly bases with positive comments from readers and customers which is extremely encouraging and prompts me to write even more.
Cornelius: Do you put a lot of care into formal aspects like spelling, grammar etc?
Tess: I try not to misspell too many wordsJ but I don’t fret about it too much, after all my blog is not about linguisticsJ
Cornelius: Oh, linguists get these things wrong all the time, don’t worry 
The reason I ask is mainly because some people (Robert Scoble, for example) say that to them blogs are conversations, so that in contrast to expository writing where you check, revise and edit a lot it’s mostly about speed and efficiency.
Your posts are very informational and complex and thus you probably spend more time planning and editing than someone like Scoble, who posts 4 or 5 very short pieces per day.
Cornelius: Has your approach to blogging changed over time?
Tess: Yes and no, after writing a lot of posts I can tell which posts are going to get a lot of hits and which ones aren’t, and also what people tend to search for when they get to my blog, so I try to keep titles etc. relevant so that more people can reach it and see immediately if it is relevant or not.
Cornelius: Do personal experiences play a role in your blogging?
Tess: I am not sure how to answer that. My blog is about personal experiences with issues that I have worked but I am not sure if that is what you are looking for.
Cornelius: My bad, the questions wasn’t phrased very well. What I meant was: do you ever refer to things that aren’t strictly work-related, things that you would describe as personal? Obviously you don’t post pictures of your cat (though some tech people do) but do you ever use anecdotes or stories in your posts?
Tess: I would say no, I don’t post much about personal experiences, in fact I think the only personal post I have made so far was when I got blog tagged.
The main reason is because I don’t think that is what people reading my blog are interested in, but having said that I would use personal references if it adds to the story, i.e. if something in my personal life could act as an analogy to explain something complex.
I do add a lot of personal comments though to make the posts more readable because I don’t want them to be stale and dry, but on the other hand I would never tell stories about my family and friends in the blog because I want to keep it informational rather than “here is what i did today”.
