I was scrolling through the latest lists of crashed sites (aka Digg) and noticed a worthy article for me to read regarding shared hosting and their tech support.  I was stunned and pretty much decided not to read the rest of the article half way through the first paragraph.  Not because I didn’t think the content was noteworthy but because the way the content was introduced:

Shared Hosting Support Sucks. And by “sucks”, I mean that it is roughly on par with the type of service you would expect at Guantanamo Bay. I take that back. Staying at Camp Gitmo is free. If you had to pay for the torture, then that would be like shared hosting support.

That’s the first five sentences, folks.  Explain to me why bringing the United States’s treatment of detainees and enemy combatants (whether there is torture at Gitmo or not) is necessary for an article that is going to discuss tech support?  It’s a major turnoff to principled people that aren’t mindlessly trudging through data but are actually consuming information.

The bottom line here is that if you’re going to blog about technology try to stay away from politics.  The only time those two subjects should merge is when you’re discussing policy that affects technology or Al Gore’s greatest invention, the Internet.  When you mix the two you tend to make a platform for technology a lightning rod of political talk which doesn’t benefit you or your readers.  Politics should not be an issue if your focus is on technology.

[tags]politics, technology, tech support, content, writing[/tags]