grack.com

Twice this week I’ve seen a situation where a popular blogger has been pestered by his readers to change the content of his blogs.

Last week, Chris Sells (of MSDN fame) posted an article entitled “Bush: Get Your Own Dream!” with his views on space exploration and foreign oil dependence.  There were two particularly asinine comments made:

Unsubscribed. Just lost a ton of respect for Sells. “nuff said”

and

… I just ask that you please post all longhorn stuff on MSDN, so I can remain informed without having to swallow your political views.

It’s amazing that someone could have so much difficulty seeing through a blogger’s political views to the tech content that they’d give up such a valuable source of information.  Losing any one of my RSS feeds could be closing so many doors in the future.  How many interesting links would I miss?

On Asa Dotzler’s Mozilla blog, he’s been covering the Mars exploration with near up-to-the-second updates from NASA.  He’s had some trouble with people complaining about too much NASA and too little Mozilla.  Last I checked, wasn’t it Asa’s spoutlet?

Thankfully the blog authors are sticking to their guns.  Asa sums the situation up nicely:

There have been a number of comments here at adot’s notblog (and even more in email) suggesting, and even demanding, that I stop blogging about Mars and the Mars rovers. To the folks making demands, piss off. To those who have politely asked that I either blog more about Mozilla, less about Mars, or implement categories to keep the two separate, I appreciate the feedback and here’s my plan:

I’m going to continue to post about whats on my mind and what I feel like writing about at that particular moment. This is my personal weblog and I don’t feel any obligation to keep it focused on topics related to my “professional” (Mozilla) responsibilities.

Chris Sells also put it well:

Just so folks know, I feel no responsibility whatsoever to keep my postings on sellsbrothers.com to a specific topic. If I want to post my political views, I’ll do so. If that bothers you, I suggest you unsubscribe now as complaints about the subject matter for my posts will fall on deaf ears.

My hat goes off to Chris and Asa.