How I Blog

Hmmm, OK, so Frank... you want to know how I blog. Right? I take that to mean the nuts and bolts stuff. If that's not what you meant, then tough, because that's what I'm gonna write about here. And the first thing I'll tell you is that I'm in a crappy mood. Well, a little crappy. I guess I've seen worse. I guess I've seen a whole hell of a lot worse, so I should cheer up and get on with it, I suppose. But a little bit grumpy, anyway. So watch it.

When one asks a lot of bloggers how they blog, one must be prepared for the results.  Naturally, I was not.  Prepared for the results, I mean.  Answers to the question came in via email, via comments, via trackbacks, via posts on other sites.  Gathering this material into a few posts won't be easy.  Acknowledging with kind regards the work of everyone who participates will result in someone being overlooked.  Yet I soldier on, creating content from other people's work, the consummate editor, hobbled by tools like a spell checker that wants to change "Google" to "Go ogle," facing deadlines, and ultimately responsible for discovering an organizational principle that will make sense of the mountain of information before me.

I blog as if there are readers, listeners, viewers... people with whom I am communicating.  I blog as a member of a community. 

I use a few simple tools to create my blog posts.  I have blogged in four different environments, using Blogger, Radio Userland, TypePad, and WordPress.  Inexpertly, I use several packages to prepare post content.  I use

• SnagIt, to grab images from the screen.

With a little help from our friends...

Michelle Goodrich put the logo together at Mandarin Design in a table layout.  Chris Locke captured it as a graphic image using one of the tools he'll talk about next week.  Frank Paynter stole it because it looks cool and posted it right here on this blog!

Next week, I'll assemble responses to this question and I'll serialize them here and at Sandhill Trek.

How do you blog, how do you blog, how do you blog...

Shelley Powers set up the Wiki for her cooking class. The class begins 10/25 and runs through 11/5. You'll find IT Kitchen here.

The IT Kitchen is a two-week clinic for webloggers and those who read webloggers and even those who don’t but still manage to use the web without stumbling all over us. The focus of the clinic is on community participation, contribution, and benefit.

I'll be clearing room on my schedule to work in the kitchen. Sandhill sux these days. It's time for some new recipes.

Lisa DiCarlo calls Bain a "White Shoe Consultancy" (thanks to Doc for the link). I wonder if this means they close down after Labor Day? Regardless, DiCarlo's Forbes article and Doc's post are thought provoking. The impediment to opening a large organization to a good relationship with its own internal IT resources is strictly cultural. Companies by and large aren't organized with coherent strategic direction of IT resources that can be embedded in business units and work to support unit goals. Budgets are segregated. IT project efforts are managed by a separate service unit. Management of the IT unit talks the talk about internal service provision and customer service to internal business partners. Often, this bespeaks a distinction, a gulf of understanding dotted with islands of responsibility in a complex enterprise.

I'm a consultant and as a rule I don't write about my quotidian adventures in the world of work. Clint, Jay -- if you happen across this, please know that my observations carry my warm regard for each of you personally. No offense intended, and I hope you'll smile with me about what I saw today.

People gathered in phone-space from three separate locations to discuss an engineering project. Right away you know this has some Dilbert potential because it's engineers

According to Boing Boing

Blogger has relaunched today, with standards-compliant templates, comments with spamblocking, streamlined blog creation, and page-per-post -- the kind of things that we've come to expect from a modern blogging tool. The redesign was executed by the arch-geniuses of Stopdesign and Adaptive Path, and it shows. This is a beautiful redesign, both in terms of look-and-feel and approachability for novices.

This evaluation may be right on the money, but a serious paying user of the Blogger product had this to say yesterday:

(In which the tale dives at warp speed from the high level generalities of a musing on architectural standards in large IT shops straight into a quotidian morass of network change management and support problems associated with migration from one tool to another to support a function that is of dubious value in the first place...)

True or false? "No one gets fired for buying IBM." This was an IT management truth for decades and it influenced key stages in the systems development life cycle for Fortune 500 companies from the day it was discovered that there actually was a market for mainframe computers to the day it was discovered that somebody ought to drive a stake in the heart of the last remaining System 370 and turn out the lights on the way out the door.

I learn a lot reading blogs, and one place that never fails to inform is JOHO the Blog. This morning the good Doctor Weinberger points us toward an essay by Dan Bricklin regarding the small software company and open source. Dan says, "I'm trying to craft a license that gets as many appropriate benefits as possible from open source, but still brings in money to put food on the table."

The essay is detailed in its discussion of challenges a small software vendor might expect to face when developing an open source product. Dan invites comments.