One thing I’m always curious about is why big companies tend to either stomp on or ignore existing communities and conventions when they try something new. One of the new features of the java.net site is some Sun employee weblogs. Even though there’s already a fine weblogging software package out there written in Java (Roller) and a community site (java.blogs), Sun chose to ignore both and go their own direction, as Dave Johnson points out (he’s the author of Roller). On the other hand, I’m glad to see Sun supporting official weblogs for their employees. I’ve really appreciated the weblog maintained by people at Microsoft, and it’s good to see Sun jump into the blog race. This is a tradition that, in my opinion, started with the .plan files of game programmers, and I’m glad to see it extend to programmers at other software companies as well.