Everywhere you look on the web, there's a blog. The sheer volume of them and
the number of posts in each one adds to the data overload while staying up to date with technology changes. The key is to find
blogs that are informative and useful to you. The set of blogs that works
for you one year may be very different from those that are useful a year later.
To a large degree, what's useful depends on what you're doing at the time. If you're working through the certification process, blogs that talk what to expect and example problems are very useful. If you're doing consulting, blogs that talk about real-world problems are more useful.
I have a blog too (http://connection.netcordia.com/blogs/terrys_blog) and have been doing it for over a year now. Averaging one post per week on a prolonged basis is much like doing a periodic newsletter (I used to do The Network Monitor (http://www.netcordia.com/resources/network-monitor.asp) at Chesapeake and at Netcordia.) I keep a running list of potential topics and look to it if I'm having problems deciding on a weekly topic. This type of blog trades consistency in topics from week to week, for greater breadth of coverage. The reason it is like doing a quarterly newsletter is because of the time commitment to do the research on articles and doing the writing.
In the CCIE arena, you have a choice of different types of blogs. One type is the set of network experts that's sponsored by Network World, such as those by Jeff Doyle or Wendel Odom. They tend to focus on CCIE technical topics, with Jeff often talking about routing and switching and Wendel talking about certification topics and questions. Others also blog for Network World on CCIE topics that are less technical but still relevant to the community. All of these blogs tend to be very informative and I like to follow them.
The other set of blogs that make sense to the CCIE (or upcoming CCIE) community are the blogs by people who are working through the CCIE study process. Their blogs are true labor of love since they take time out of their study efforts to record what they're doing and the questions they've encountered or lab exercises they've created. In a way, these folks are helping themselves reinforce what they've learned by writing down their steps.
In the days before blogs, people would create and maintain sets of web pages with links to different subjects. Pete Welcher at Netcraftsmen is well known for his long list of technical articles (http://netcraftsmen.net/welcher/index.html), some of which were published in The Network Monitor and in the old Cisco World magazine during the dot-com days. So while his delivery mechanism isn't strictly a blog, it is the same basic concept. If you're studying for a certification, finding several blogs on the subject matter is useful for learning from other people's experiences. The other staff at Netcraftsmen are writing on a variety of topics like security, QoS, CCDE, or even network quizzes useful for certification readiness (http://netcraftsmen.net/TechResources.htm). Some blogs allow comments, so they seem more like a forum than a blog, potentially making them more useful as more people comment on different approaches to a single problem or question. Similarly, you can get different views of similar technology and problems by reading the blogs of several people who are working through the same study process.
In all these cases, people are using blogs to learn from each other and to share what they know. That is what has made the web a great tool (or place).
-Terry
Terry Slattery is a Principal Consultant at Chesapeake Netcraftsmen. He previously founded Netcordia and Chesapeake Computer Consultants, invented NetMRI and the v-Lab hands-on training system. Terry co-authored "Advanced IP Routing in Cisco Networks," and is the second CCIE, #1026. -Eman