After months and months of me nagging him, my brother finally took the plunge and signed up with Blogcritics, who've been eager for more science and technology posts. He actually made his move just before I got dugg, but that gave me another opportunity to point out that if my pathetic little post could make it on that site, there's obviously a market for that kind of thing - just imagine stuff written by someone who knows what they're talking about.
His first article? Made the front page of Digg, with the resulting huge spike in readers and comments. I'm so proud, you'd think we were related. Warning: if you're going to click on those links, it's an instructional post on how to author DVDs in Linux. Um, not that there's anything wrong with that. (He also goes with the real name. Quite a while ago I told him that if I'd known what I'd be writing about when I started the blog, I might have used my full name. His response: "What did you think you were going to write? Porn?")
I asked him if this instant Digg success meant it was a good time to say "I told you so." Silly me. It's always a good time to tell my big brother "I told you so." This could be the start of a little sibling rivalry, except ... no. I expect he'll be on Digg a lot, and he can have it.
The reason I kept encouraging him to join Blogcritics is that he's exceptionally good at explaining this techie stuff to the non-techie, in person and in writing. I can do fairly complicated things like setting up the Beyond TV PVR because I can follow instructions, even if I don't know what I'm doing. But that's also why I couldn't go with an open source version of a PVR - because the documentation was not written for the average joe or jane. There's a shortage of clear instructions out there for those of us who don't really get or care about the technical stuff, and my ever-patient, ever-geeky brother is just the one to help fill that gap.
