I was chatting with a good friend of mine who happened to be one of my readers as well. Being a good friend he did not sugar coat his thoughts and opinions, as they say “friends stub you in front”. And, as it typically goes, when we were done fighting we only strengthen our positions and views. So, no adjustment or reviews are coming to the 100+ posts I wrote so far. Also as it goes in frank discussions between friends a few interesting topics came up, a few questions that needed mulling over. One of them was quite intriguing for me: “is blog format a misfit for what I am trying to accomplish in pragmatic outsourcing?”

For all intents and purposes PO is a collection of my thoughts, experiences, ideas, etc. directly or loosely related to IT outsourcing. I write the blog as if I am writing a book on IT outsourcing one random chapter at a time. When I look at the table of content it looks like I’ve got a plenty of material for a decent size book already. That approach has a few serious shortcomings though. The main is chronological nature of blog is counterintuitive for technical writing and even more so for reading. Those who elect to subscribe to my blog most likely find the info disorganized, sometimes repetitive, etc. Those who stumble upon my blog looking for offshore advice find info often incomplete. And so on.

Another blog format related challenge comes from expectations of constant updates. That as I move along closing more and more topic becomes more and more complex. Things, unless you consider current news approach are not terribly dynamic. For example, I wrote about India vs. China from IT outsourcing standpoint; that post is soon to be a year old. Some economy trends changed, political and industry events changed some of the elements and tweaked the balance. Of course things changed. Yet how much, is that worth placing an update to that post, revise views and positions, nope, I am afraid the changes no matter how significant did not affect foundations and views presented in that post, chances are it will be a long while before rewriting or updating the post is warranted.

I am not running out of topics yet, there is a lot to cover, and I am not planning to switch the format or type of content. I would appreciate your thoughts on that question though…

And one more thing worth mentioning: Kirill Abgarian, one of my readers and supporters, suggested that I should put my knowledge in a book about Pragmatic Outsourcing. I got quite excited about that idea; while time-wise and skill-wise I could not possibly do it, but considering an offshore ghost writer support and an ebook format that appeared to be very doable. I shopped around what it would take, swaged some purchase dynamics and came to a sad conclusion that I would need to have at least couple thousands subscribers before I could cover the expense of writing and publishing the book. That’s considerably more than I have at the moment, so no ebook for now… but maybe some time in a future…