Getting personal a source of blog success

The best blog posts are personal.

I have found over time that whenever I brought my own life into the virtual pages of my ZDNet open source blogs, I've gotten solid base hits, sometimes home runs.

This is illustrated by the 17th most-popular post here in 2008, which I dubbed The Kids are Alright with Linux.

The title was a pun, referencing a 1979 documentary on The Who. The who in this case was a what, namely the Linux network I found when I brought my son to school for his senior year.

What inspired me to write this as soon as I got back were the users I found. These were not my son's contemporaries but some elementary-age kids, children of one of his teachers.

They were quietly playing learning games while mom did her business. They were enjoying themselves, the older ones helping the younger ones, the human interaction based on how close the terminals were to one another.

Computing is often a solitary pursuit. What I found this day was that it does not have to be. This was a revelation both in terms of computing and in terms of education.

And it was the little children who lead led me.