Unoriginal Thoughts Bear Repeating

I suspect every blogger aspires to publish original content.  Unfortunately, in a world where original thoughts/ideas no longer exist, this is virtually impossible.

Maybe I am making this up, but I think it is only a matter of time before thoughts are appropriately republished.  It’s like fashion.  This year’s hip style was trendy in one form or another years ago.  The style was literally worn out, then put on a shelf until someone came along and decided to put a form of those super “new” pants back on.  Like the clothes we wear (the music we listen to, the TV we watch), thoughts become fresh and new if enough time passes. You may have noticed this phenomenon recently when blog and podcast conversations turned to topics like whether or not developers should learn C or whether or not developers should still be using stored procedures.  

There’s also plenty of really great content which didn’t get enough looks the first time around, didn’t rank high in Google and, as far as I am concerned, is basically lost for ever.  Earlier today, for example, I was trying to track down some information. I knew the blog and the general topic. Actually, I remembered specific text but I still couldn’t find the post in the sea of information.  Lost forever. One of the reasons good content gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that there is very literally too much information available to us. It is information overload thanks to all of the non-stop blogging/Twittering/video-making/podcasting/book-writing folks in the tech community.

Again, I believe every blogger aspires to publish original content.  I know I have always been concerned with writing about things which have already been said, but does this attitude make sense considering how much information deserves more attention or even a second chance?  Having only started to read/write blog posts about two years ago, I, for one, have missed a lot and I sure am thankful that good content tends to echoes since most of the online debates are news to me.  Everything is cyclical and the good topics are noteworthy each time around.  Do you think good information bears repeating? 

I’m going to wrap with three unoriginal thoughts:

1. A Suggestion: To all of the folks contributing to the information overload, get back to work! And by “work,” I mean your real jobs. I can’t keep up with you. Can anybody?
2. A Recommendation:  The stackoverflow podcast is excellent.  It is a great, hardly-ever-on-topic, unscripted, one-hour, weekly dialogue between two industry enthusiasts, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, about their new stackoverflow.com endeavor.  It’s truly enjoyable.  You will laugh.  You will cry.  You should listen in. 
3. A Quick Story: I listened to Stackoverflow podcast #7 last night.  This was a delinquent listen as it was recorded on 5/27.  Part of the discussion revolved around OpenID which prompted Joel to play the role of a future stackoverflow user and setup an account.  The registration process was easy although Joel struggled to interpret the characters displayed in the MyOpenID CAPTCHA. He went as far as to comment about the CAPTCHA audio display.  So, I reviewed my archived posts this morning and I wrote about that exact topic on 6/10.  Hearing the words coming out of Joel’s mouth last night made my stomach sink as I technically posted unoriginal content about two weeks after it was presented in the podcast.  By no means am I saying the CAPTCHA observations are really great topics, but I guess I am still concerned with writing about things which have already been said.  If this post speaks to anyone, I hope it is me.