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December 23, 2005

JetBrainer’s Blogs

Let me introduce 3 active and cool blogs of my colleagues from JetBrains.

First, there’s "Dmitry Jemerov’s Weblog" While reading this blog by Dmitry Jemerov you will get the latest news from the front-line of IntelliJ IDEA development. Dmitry is one of great developers of IntelliJ IDEA. In his blog he discloses the top secret information and screenshots of new features of IntelliJ IDEA long before they appear in the public access. Just look at some of his posts:
IntelliJ IDEA 6.0: Introducing the Build Server
IntelliJ IDEA 6.0: JavaScript navigation and completion
IntelliJ IDEA 6.0: Structural Search Inspections
IntelliJ IDEA 6.0: Runtime assertions for @NotNull

Second, there’s "Alex Tkachman’s Weblog" This is a blog by JetBrains’ Marketing Director – Alexander Tkachman. But don’t make word "marketing" fool you. Unlike many marketing guys you know, Alexander has a very solid technical background along with his great marketing experience. In his blog Alex uncovers what is going on in JetBrains from the very inside.

The third blog is "Sashka’s Weblog" by a JetBrains web-site manager and usability engineer, Alexandra Maximova. She doesn’t like the fact that IntelliJ IDEA is for programmers only and dreams that it’ll be also a great tool for web-designers. Along with other interesting topics, in her blog she writes about IntelliJ IDEA features that makes web-designer’s life easier.

I was going to write about these 3 blogs only, but, after checking our list of blogs at JetBrains People page I've discovered that 3 more JetBrainers have revived (or started) their English blogs recently:

Kir Maximov revived his blog yesterday. Kir, known as an author of IdeTalk plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, now develops the teamwork features for IntelliJ IDEA 6.0.

Oleg Stepanov, developer of Resharper and project manager of DotTrace, just revived his blog, and we should expect very interesting information about the course of Resharper and DotTrace development.

Mike Aizatsky, the leader of IntelliJ IDEA enterprise features team, has started his Random Rare Posts blog just 2 days ago. I wish him to write his rare and random posts quite often and regularly.

Ok, so, what should be the next theme in this blog? The next theme – is about books… You may ask - what books? To get the answer, wait for the next post.

Do you want to comment on this post? Don’t hesitate – write any questions or opinions, and my answer won’t wait to follow

Posted by Dmitriev at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2005

Business Plan for Blog

Recently I’ve heard a lot of complaints from my colleagues that I should revive this blog. It looks like a blog becomes more and more essential accessory of a person, and, being very dynamic, even more then personal webpage.

I can imagine that in 5 years you won't ask: “do you have a blog”, but, instead, “where is your blog?”,the same as 10 years ago we used to ask - “do you have email?”, but now just : “what is your email?”
Of course in 5 years blogs won't remain the same as now, but this is another topic and it's worth writing about it in a separate post.

Let's start the business plan of the project "Sergey Dmitriev’s personal blog in English".
What is a strategic goal of it?
This is the simplest part, of course it should be: “To become the most popular blog in the world”

Ok, with the great goal like this in mind I should first find at least some means for reaching it.
After some consideration I see that:
First, the popular blog is the source of interesting information.
- So my blog should become such source for those people who are interested in the projects in which I’m involved directly: JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, MPS, Beelaxy. My interests are wider though, as you will see later (just subscribe!)

Second, the popular blog should help people to socialize – it means if people are interested in an article – they discuss it in comments and other blogs.
- My participating in such discussions will make my life more meaningful and my blog more popular. So, no problem here

Third, the reference to popular blog spreads like virus through recommendations in other blogs.
- Of course, I'll ask my colleagues to recommend my blog in their blogs, and I'm going to recommend their blogs in exchange – good start, IMO

Fourth, after reading some of my blog post you should want to subscribe to the blog.
- Oh, that’s easy: I’m sure that after reading this post you will subscribe to blog, don’t you?

Fifth, the most complicated: once subscribed, you won't unsubscribe.
Thus I'll publish some very exciting stuff here quite regularly.

Some popular blogs became a powerful marketing tool.
I know a least 2 bloggers whose blogs are more popular then their companies:
Martin Fowler from Thoughtworks


and Joel Spolsky from FogCreek

So, the first goal is quite easy – I should just make this blog more popular than website www.jetbrains.com. As a result, JetBrains or whatever will succeed just from mentioning it in my blog.
2 small problems stand on the way of making this blog the most popular in the world:
First, I don’t know English well. Second, I don’t have any writing skills. (writing compositions was that I hated at school most of all). Thus, until these problems are solved, you will suffer my awful style and miserable English. But it shouldn’t stop you to subscribe to this blog!

Ok, so, what is the next topic on this blog’s way to glory?
The next topic – is small but very important. I will give you very important presentation of 3 other blogs by JetBrainers… To be continued…

Do you want to comment this post? Don’t hesitate – write any questions or opinions, and I’ll answer…

Posted by Dmitriev at 10:55 AM | Comments (7)