Johan Lindfors is Technical Evangelism Manager at Microsoft, in Sweden, and is responsible for the technical evangelism which is bestowed upon the developers all around Sweden, including the swedish version of the MSDN website.

He’s known face to many developers in Sweden, not only for having been an active blogger for 5 years, but first and foremost from his eager touring around the nation with the MSDN Live road show, reaching out to thousands of people each year, to spread the gospel.

What got you into blogging?

During the PDC in 2003 I realized that blogging was an additional way in reaching out to developers with suggestions and ideas. My first posts discussed Web Services and Security and made me quickly realize that despite the tremendous amount of information available on the internet, the information was rarely rated or moderated other than by the publisher. That’s also why most of my posts are actually some sort of “filtering” others content, and especially information being published by Microsoft.

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

If a post gets a lot of attention and especially comments, I feel proud and encouraged to continue posting. Naturally reading good posts and commenting can also motivate me to write own posts with associations to others.

What profile do you try and give your blog?

A personal opinion on the Microsoft Developer Platform.

How has blogging affected the way you work?

It’s now a natural day of the business. I’m trying to include my blog in presentations and other communications to give the intended audience a channel of communication and a possibility to comment on the resources we provide. It’s also my own primary way of communication broadly to the developer audience in Sweden.

How has blogging affected the developer community?

I think that the primary resource of information and problem solving is currently blogs and similar RSS-enabled resources. We still need to improve our understanding of search engines and the optimizations we can do in our posts to provide accurate and resourceful posts.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

A lot of companies are considered more open with their communication, more personal in the style and also interested to having more people visible in the cloud. This is both a positive and negative aspect to consider for a company. Having more people visible is naturally a positive side (as long as these people behave correctly and in accordance to the companies values and overall regulations) but also means that more resources are spent on people appearance and brands than on the overall company brand.

I think it’s actually possible that subscribers to a blog can be extremely satisfied with the blogger but in the same time be dissatisfied with the bloggers company (or the company he or she represents) but I do think that the blogger will decrease dissatisfaction in the long run in being more personal, direct and humble in the information provided.

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

Absolutely, I also believe that if someone is disallowed to blog on the work time he or she will still blog in the spare time, and when being personal in the touch, how satisfied are you with a company that doesn’t allow you to do what you want (if you believe it’s a good thing naturally).

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

I’d like to see more “team-blogging” when building resources for specific technologies and products. Instead of spreading the resources all over the internet and giving the value to the search engines, I’d like to give this value back to the bloggers and simplify the discussion ‘round common challenges and solutions.

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

I’d like to consider our transformation from sending out invitations to events and activities to now leveraging blogs and occasional newsletters instead as a success story for our blogging efforts. Also, I more often stumble upon developers that mention having found a solution or some interesting information through or even on my blog and that keeps me satisfied!

I’d like to thank Johan for taking the time to participate in this interview! If you’d like to read more from Johan, please visit his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/johanl where he writes about a broad spectrum of subjects related to software development.

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here.