Agile Lab - Training, Coaching and Consultancy: On blogging - a post that never was

I tweeted this:

Ugh!Didn't like http://bit.ly/mIdJU Really? I should write my own blogging software? If I write a novel should I write a word processor?

Which resulted in this response from Dumbledad.

Mark, really I wanted to comment on this tweet of yours(http://twitter.com/Mark_Stringer/status/1762534980 ) but you haven't blogged about it! Anyway, surely if I usurp a post on your seriously undangerous picture you wont mind ;-)
Don't you think that in the early days of the novel writers were developping tools in tandem with the novels themselves. One thinks of Proust's layers and layers of stuck on corrections and rewrites. Even now some writers use old typewriters, some a mass of post-its in a shed.
So, we're close (ish) to the start of blogging wouldn't you expect bloggers to tinker with blogging tools. Some wont have the skills to build tools, but some will. Some wont have the skills to customise tools, but many will. And they'll all have the skill to customise their blogging process.

I understand Dumbledad's point - and I agree with it to some degree, of course people with all manner of abilities should carry on innovating, improving an customising tools - as if anybody could stop them. But that still doesn't stop me disliking that post. I think it tries to create the impression that you have to able to do this kind of tinkering to even start SEO'ing your blog. And this just isn't true. Surely, making this the first point in your list would tend to put of the 99% of people (maybe more) who can't write software.

I don't want to create this impression. I would like as many people as possible to know just how much they can do - how easy it is to say what the hell they like - and get people to read it via search engines, without knowing a single thing about the technology (this is why I think Darren Rowse's #31DBBB is a very noble pursuit). There's nothing wrong with people learning everything about the technical stuff later, but putting it right at the front feels a bit like a smoke screen.

Perhaps hidden behind this - let's not call it dishonesty, let's call it - "strange emphasis", might be a discomfort with the way the world of the web and blogs and SEO is changing. Certain aspects of the business of setting up and promoting a website and a blog - and some much more complicated sites - are becoming very cheap and easy to do for people who have a minimum level of technical skills. The person I know who knows most about SEO is a photographer. At the same time, the technical knowledge of the "not technical" people is increasing in areas that are directly useful to them. A friend of mine was just telling me yesterday that he tried to tell a film director that he couldn't have something that he wanted on a blog - the film director's response was "Why not? I can get that in moveable type - look just give me access to the CSS and I'll do it."

OK - this is how I manage to shoe-horn this post into a blog about Agile software development methods. The cost in time and money and skills requirements of knocking up a pretty darn good state-of-the-art website is falling catastrophically. The way things are changing is going to play havoc with "established" models of software development - even Agile ones. Talk to a lot of companies that try to make money from web development and they'll tell you that they only really make money on the "easy" bits - setting up, hosting, CMS. It's devlish hard to make money out of actually writing new software. What's going to happen when the punters can easily do all those bits themselves and only ask the technical people in to do the difficult bits? This is something that occurred to me when I listened to a 10-year retrospective talk "Agility in the UK" at SPA2009. Some of the speakers seemed to think that we were still in a world of "soviet style" 1-2 year development projects.

Web developers: are they?