I spend a lot of time looking through the tweets I've favorited, curated, and retweeted, digging deeper into the digital presence of the people and companies behind them. This is how I expand my LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, and other networks, as well as establish a better understanding the people who are moving things forward in the API space.
When I click on the profile of someone doing interesting things with APIs, and I see their personal domain as part of their profile, I always click on it. Nothing makes more sad for the future of tech than when these domains are gone, dormant and horribly out of date. It means this person is doing interesting things for a company but is not capturing any of the exhaust from this work for themselves--even just the occasional story on their blog.
Nothing sucks your time and value than having a job. The emptiest portions of my CV's are when I've had jobs. I'm not bashing having a job, I'm just bashing where the bar currently is for employers when it comes to stimulating the creativity, and ownership of ideas among their workers. Even if it is just a little restriction in place on blogging and tweeting, and a fear of saying something you are not supposed too, this will restrict and limits someone's creativity, and will always come back to hurt an employer in the long run.
I'm sure there are many reasons why someone stops blogging and creating within their own domain while working for a company, organization, institution, or government agency, but the majority of the reasons I am sure will leave me pretty sad at the state of creativity in the tech space. I really enjoy the thoughts from folks in the space that flow around their own ideas, and their views on technology, without the influence of who they work for and the products and services they build daily. These are the ideas I think enrich the world of APIs more than any single corporate blog or PR channel--wish they were encourage more, and not killed.
