Feeling uneasy spamming people

[szabgab]

I am following the suggestions several people gave me on how to get involved in DW. I am checking out people linked from the comments to that post and some other posts I made. Reading some of their entries commenting on those entries I find some interesting and marking them as being in my circle. Then I follow some more links from their posts and do the whole thing again recursively.

But I feel uneasy commenting on blogs of total strangers and marking people quite randomly. Why them and not some others from the other 6 billion out there?
I don't know them personally. I don't even know them online. Maybe I read a few lines they wrote, but then what?
That does not really give me any right to just push my unwanted words on them.

I have my own blog elsewhere where I have been writing for 3 years or so but that was strictly professional. I was commenting on other peoples blogs but those were professional entries as well.

I guess I am uneasy with getting too personal with total strangers.

Comments

[zorkian]

Don't look on it as spam, though. If someone is making a post that is interesting and you want to say something, then you're welcome to do so!

A community like Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, etc, is rather different than you're probably used to in the rest of the "blogosphere". Much of the point of being here is for the community building aspect: learning a bit more about what makes someone tick, about the beliefs and thoughts and ideas behind them, and having interesting discussions.

It's a weird feeling coming in if you're used to one-to-many conversations, but the many-to-many supported here can be very interesting.

If nothing else, you can continue to blog as if you're one-to-many, and if you write interesting things people will start to recommend you to the people they know. Eventually you build up readers. Much the same as in "regular" blogging.

I suppose it comes down to what you want, too. If your only interest is to discuss Perl and programming philosophies, to talk about design patterns and the proper way to handle errors (exceptions!), then you might be best served writing about it first to attract people who are interested in it.

But if you're more open to just hanging out, finding interesting people to talk to - no matter what the subject - then definitely poke around, follow links, look for people you think are interesting, and say hi.

other than just Perl

[szabgab]

Actually the main thing that might be intersting for me in DW is to talk about other things than Perl. Of course as that language is a large part of my life - both on a professional level and as a hobby - I am sure that will be mentioned as well.

Besides that I am quite interested in how DW - the project and codebase is maintained so I guess I'll take a look at that too and it occured to me that DW might be a platform that is quite ortogonal to my professional blog and thus might be an interesting place to find people other than perl hackers for my projects.