A short note this one.
I’ve now upgraded all of my WordPress sites to WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”.
Everything upgraded without a hitch, which was a pleasure and a relief.
I did all of the usual safety things and took backups of the files and the database, but didn’t need any of them.
Once the preparation was done, all I had to do was to click “upgrade”, so easy anyone could do it.
A big thank you WordPress.org and a similar sized thank you to all of the plug-in writers who’ve updated their code.
This post isn’t going to say anything of any real value other than to say that I’m trying out the WordPress Client Beta for BlackBerry.
It looks like it will be a really tidy little application for blogging those ideas that are on my mind and need to be written there and then.
The problem with those ideas is that they aren’t, on consideration, normally that good.
For those of you who are reading this through a some kind of Reader you might be interested to know that I’ve been tweaking the design on this site. 
For the rest of you, you’ve probably already noticed.
There was a bit of thought behind it:
I’ve still got some tweaking to do.
Let me know what you think.
There has been a bit of discussion around recently about the value of blogging, with some people giving in because they can’t make a decent living from it.
I don’t do it for a living, but I was intrigued as to what my blog would be worth.
I don’t think I’ll be giving up the day job any time soon.
I have quite a complicated set of criteria for writing what I write on this blog.
My first criteria is value. Is what I am writing of some value to someone. It might just be of value to me – helping me to construct a set of thoughts. If I’m trying to construct these thoughts then perhaps others are too. It might be something I’ve found that I think others would like to know about and it might be a set of opinions that I want to express.
That’s the positive side, but I also have a set of criteria for things that I avoid writing about:
All of these criteria leave me with a lot of grey areas; where it’s grey I’ll always err on the side of caution and not write.
I also won’t aggregate into my blog all of the other stuff that I contribute to on the web – del.icio.us it visible as is twitter, but I’m not going to copy them in as posts. The same with flickr, and facebook. If people want to connect with those streams then they can do so by the appropriate mechanism. The other reason why I don’t do this that I’m just duplicating the number of times many people see the same piece of information. I’m considering turning off notifications of my blog updates in twitter for this very reason; I regularly read the same piece of information twice which annoys me, and probably annoys others too.
I write lots of stuff and only some of it appears here. This probably makes my online persona difficult to pin down, but it’s only ever going to a part of who I am. I think that I need to do a better job of showing people where I’m contributing, but I don’t think that aggregating it all together into a single stream is the way to do it.
A spend a good deal of time pondering whether I have the balance right; I’m still not sure.
The IT landscape is composed of millions of moving components that we plumb together to create thousands of applications. We then take the thousands of applications and plumb them together to make systems.
But how do you know what works with what, how do you find out what the problems are. You’d think that this was a simple question, but it’s not. There are many reasons that it’s not simple, one of the main ones is the relationship between organisations. It’s very difficult for one organisation to validate the work of another organisation without a lot of work. Lots of the larger vendors run verification programmes but they can be expensive especially for the smaller application vendors.
Citrix has recently taken a different approach – community verification.
The IT community is integrating applications and components all of the time and Citrix is hoping to tap into all of this knowledge, but also to make it available to everyone else.
“The Community Verified site is a platform in which third party products are added and verified by community members. Community members are helping each other by posting and voting on third party products known to work in their environment. These products do not get any Citrix Ready program benefits.”
There’s no warranty involved here just the knowledge that someone else has gone ahead of you and managed to succeed, a very valuable asset. The voting system also enables you to put some weighting behind your confidence.
In my experience it’s not integration of applications from the large well known vendors that cause the problems, it’s integration of products from smaller companies. These companies have less extensive experience and who would be struggling to undertake a formal verification activity anyway. A community based approach gives a very valuable middle ground.
On day 2 of my quest to have a meaningful conversation every day, today I had breakfast with a friend.
The conversations were all personal so I’m not going to detail them here.
It feels like a different conversation to business ones but they still require the same set of communication skills. So I’m not sure that I want to consider them as different conversations, just different subjects. I need to think about how Powell’s five levels of communication apply.
I tend to read blogs in three ways.
It’s not something I have consciously built up, it just seems to be the way I have gone.
I’ve also noticed myself subconsciously rating a whole blog in a similar way:
I’ve also noticed that when blogs that I regard as a snack produce items that are longer than a snack they tend to get scanned. Blogs that get scanned are the ones that I’m likely to delete from my reader, because scanning is of limited value.
Some example of what I mean for different blogs:
Blog | Snack Rating | Dining Rating | Scanning Rating |
2 | *8* | 0 | |
*8* | 0 | 2 | |
*10* | 0 | 0 | |
| Endgadget | 3 | 0 | *7* |
1 | 0 | *9* | |
2 | *7* | 1 | |
1 | 0 | *9* | |
2 | *7* | 1 | |
*9* | 1 | 0 |
A reader is, of course, essential to this type of working.
The question this leaves me is this:
How do people relate to my blog?
Am I a snack?
Am I a dinner?
Or am I a scan?
If you want to be noticed as a blogger – you have to blog.
It would seem like a reasonably easy equation, but how much do you have to blog to be really noticed, if noticed is what you want to be.
Well it would appear that the answer according to Technorati is at least 2 to 4 times a day, and if you want to be really, really noticed you have to blog more than 10 times a day.
Well, there is little chance of me getting to 10 a day, perhaps I should just aim to be one of the 22% of top 5000 bloggers who write things that are so good that writing less than one post a day is good enough.
I still think that quality is better than quantity – but then I would, I don’t have a lot of quantity.
I quite like the idea from Micro Explosion Media of the meal verses snack ratio.
Personally, I try for three posts a week and employ my meal verses snack ratio with those three posts (one meal, two snacks).
I suppose that’s about what I do. Perhaps a few too many snacks recently though.
I’m sure I’m not going to be the only one to be this over the next few days, but it’s fun all the same.
In celebration of 10 years Google has made a specific search available to show results from 2001.
Being the humble fellow that I am, I had to see what the difference in the results for “chastney” were. So from 2001:
I have to admit to doing this in the full knowledge of what the result shows today:
That’s right, in 2001 I didn’t feature at all, today I feature in the top spot – twice.
Back in 2001 there were only 328 entries – now in 2008 we mange 11,800, still a relatively small number.
One of these days I will manage to write something to surpass my now defunct post on Windows Live Writer Dictionary Hacks. The problem is – I keep linking to it.
It’s nice to see that Jimmy and Grandad get a mention under my Flickr stream, but that’s probably only because they were the last pictures that I posted.
It also shows that I need to work a bit harder on my “happenings” site so that it appears somewhere.
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