Blog the answers to questions that people ask you

Scott Hanselman keeps a developer blog that I look at every once and awhile and I really liked one thing he wrote about. Let me paraphrase.

Sometimes he’d get emails from people asking him one question or another. He’d respond to these emails, but then he realized that his mini-question-and-answer could actually benefit a lot of people if they only came across it. So instead of just replying to the email, he’d take the question and his answer and post them both up on his blog. That way, the knowledge could benefit anybody who came across it, then or in the future. Clever, huh?

I just like the optimism there. It’s the audacity of believing that something you have to share could be valuable to other people if they got a chance to see it. It’s that optimism that grows the web from a computer protocol into a global community of people each contributing their part to build a comprehensive online repository of knowledge and culture.

I don’t get a lot of people emailing me with questions, but props to Hanselman for taking that opportunity to tweak the formula and share with the rest of us. It may not seem like much, but small efforts add up. It’s democratizing knowledge… one email at a time.