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Though our blog has been quiet lately, there’s been quite a hubbub in the Infovark Burrow. Read about what we’ve been up to lately.
I’m embarrassed. James Dellow asked how Gordon and I decide what to blog about back in October, and I just noticed today. Thanks for the ping, James, and here’s your belated answer.
When Gordon and I started Infovark, all we had was an early database schema, something we called “the spiderweb diagram”, and one investor. (His name is Warren, but I call him Dad.)
We immediately began blogging. In many ways it was — and is — a distraction from design and coding, but we were bursting with ideas that we couldn’t share at our old job.
We also wanted to test the waters a bit. Though we’d seen a lot of frustration with current information management and content management tools in our former roles as consultants, we wanted to make sure there really was a market there. And since we couldn’t talk about the solution yet — because we were still drafting it — we decided to talk about the problem instead.
It’s a strategy that’s worked really well for us. We’ve gotten a lot of great insights from folks leaving comments or reacting to our posts on their own blogs. It’s helped shape and narrow our focus.
The principal theme of this blog has been how traditional enterprise software overlooks (or impairs) individual productivity while meeting broader organizational imperatives. We talk a lot about top-down versus bottom-up implementation approaches, principles of emergent systems, and software design. Most of the topics come from our Twitter friends, our feed readers, and discussions amongst ourselves.
Over time, we’ve also added two sub-themes. One is about the challenges of running a software start-up and the other is about the product we’re building. (Expect us to starting post more frequently about these.) We’ve gotten good feedback on those topics, too. Ideas related to these subjects pop up naturally based on what we happen to be working on at the time.
Several months ago, we decided to split some of our more technical topics on to a separate blog, the Underground, specific to software development. We wanted to share tips and tricks with other programmers. We also wanted to publicize the books, frameworks and tools we find especially useful. We particularly wanted to highlight free and open source tools. We figure if we can’t pay them in cash, we can at least praise them in public.
I personally get most of my topics from the books I read and the RSS feeds I consume. I’m a voracious reader. My Google Reader tracks more than 180 blogs. I’ve organized them into broad categories: design, enterprise content management, Enterprise 2.0, personal productivity, programming, technology news, tools, and venture capital. I also track friends’ blogs, video/computer game blogs, and cartoons. I’m not all about work.
Once an idea strikes us, we draft an article on WordPress. Some posts just come together, others require more work. Between the two blogs, we probably have 50 drafts in various stages of completion.
Once we finally finish one, we mark it as pending review. Gordon edits my posts and I edit his. A former boss of mine — and a gifted writer — insists that “everyone needs an editor” and it’s advice I’ve taken to heart. Between the two of us, we try to maintain some semblance of coherence and quality.
And that’s how the magic happens.
So the “how to decide what to write about” meme may have languished a bit, but I’ll try to revive it. My apologies to anyone in the list below that might have been previously tagged.
I’m curious about how these bloggers decide what to write:
Over to you, folks…
We’ve decided to create a separate blog specifically for techies. We call it infovark Underground. It describes all the cool technology stuff we’re doing under the covers. Its target is other software architects and developers.
Our primary blog will still be this one at http://www.infovark.com. It will deal with issues of enterprise 2.0, social networking, and running a small ISV. Its target audience remains knowledge workers (our customers, hopefully) and industry watchers (our advocates, hopefully).
We debated about addressing everything in a single feed, but decided that we were really dealing with two different audiences: those that care about business problems and those that care about code problems. And even though we at infovark are deeply interested in the intersection of those two worlds, we know that not all visitors to our site will feel the same way.
We’ll try to keep cross-posting to a minimum, but we’ll occasionally link from one to the other if a topic applies to both communities. After all, Enterprise 2.0 is about social technology, isn’t it? We’d like to help build bridges between the MBA suits and the IT geeks.
A friend of mine was lamenting the corporate blog phenomenon the other day:
“It’s the ‘I would like to have a lovely conversation with you. About snake oil.’ tenor which so many of them seem to have. It’s so… demeaning. “
Hmmm. Consider:
- Steve Rubel suggests that the tech blogosphere is drunk on its own Web 2.0 Kool-Aid.
- Chris Anderson gives up and publishes the email addresses of the PR hacks who pester him with spam press.
- Whole Foods prohibits its executives from any kind of blogging or online forum participation
- Even Robert Scoble seems to have lost a bit of his enthusiasm.
Corporate blogging is a weird subset of the blogosphere, and maybe its bubble is about to burst. It does seem to have come to some kind of introspective adolescent crossroads.
(Mind you, corporate blogging is what I’m doing now. It’s alive and well here at infovark.)
Corporate Gord says: “Buy This!”
(Cartoon via Hugh Mcleod)
Personally, I still see plenty of value in corporate blogs. I don’t have a problem with crummy “Your Call Is Important To Us” press-release-style astroturf content. It tells me that their organization doesn’t understand permission marketing. It tells me that they follow internet trends without truly understanding them. Companies like that aren’t the kinds of companies I want to buy things from.
But I’m glad that I can see this on their corporate blogs. It makes my purchasing decisions a lot easier. As an example, the OpenText Blog tells me nothing personal or insightful — it just presents lots of case studies and PR stuff about how clever OpenText are. Similarly, the Microsoft Enterprise Content Management Blog contains nothing but detailed technical information about SharePoint.
On the positive side, lots of companies are better because of blogging. As an example, I’d always felt that Oracle were a bunch of cold, mean, database robots who delighted in making software so complicated it made me cry. But after reading the blogs of people like Billy Cripe, Bex Huff. and the Oracle Apps Lab team, I’ve come to view them in a different light. (Now I realize the robots actually have feelings!)
I predict the more boring, hype-laden, PR-driven blogs will disappear as old-school companies gradually realize they are doing themselves more harm than good. They’ll go back to older, safer ways of pushing as little content as possible while hoping that their customers will still turn up to buy stuff.
Best of luck with that.