Jeff Smith on blogging & my thoughts

Do you blog?  Are you thinking of blogging?  Do you like THAT Jeff Smith and his Oracle SQL Developer tool?  If you answered yes to any of these, I would check out Jeff's LinkedIn post about what he learned by blogging for 30 days in a row.  I am not sure how many days in a row I have blogged now, I am trying for an entire year without missing a day, but I would add these to his bulleted list:

Blogging consistently makes you learn consistently.  Ever get that question about what you would tell your self years ago if you could travel through time?  I would give my younger self the advice to start blogging from my first moment on the job not only because of the opportunities like presenting that might come, or being more involved in the Oracle community, but because it would force me to get engaged and learn each and every day.

The more technical your content, the more hits you get.  I thought I had a lot of hits when I went to Hotsos in March since I finally broke the 2000 hits/month milestone, but the past 2 months have seen me hit well over 3500 hits/month due to the more technical content I have shared which was full of error messages and 12c specific information.  This month?  A lot less technical content/keywords which can be picked up by search engines so my metrics are trending for less than 3000 hits/month for October.

You need to understand what your social input bandwidth threshold is.  That is a lot of words for "do not get overwhelmed by all the stuff out there" because once you have a blog list, it will grow.  When you get on LinkedIn, your network will grow.  If you start Tweeting, you will have a lot of followers/followees/content to dig through.  Quickly, you can get overrun by input and start turning a deaf ear towards them in order to "get control".

Decide if you want to use images to enhance or show what you are talking about.  There are a lot of great blogs out there that use images to teach or reference and that is fantastic for what they are doing, or they regularly have images which really make me think of them as more professional than the pure text posts I do on a regular basis.

Do not depend on a single source for content.  If you have been visiting the blog for a while you will probably have noticed that right now I am really picking on a particular source for a lot of content right now.  That is probably related to my third point tonight, as there are just SO many inputs out there it is easy to target in on one source and keep riding it until you (or your audience) get bored with it.  I am going to try and break that trend over the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

So from Jeff's list, I would say I have followed #1, #3, #5, #6 (since Google does not charge), and #8 with this post.  :}

Oracle Open World: Blogger Meetup

Are you heading to Oracle Open World?  Do you blog about Oracle technology?  If you answered yes to both of these, then you should sign up for Pythian's blogger meetup!  Just take a look at the line up with everybody that is signing up, and it is a veritable who's who of Oracle bloggers so do not miss this great opportunity to do some networking.  Between this and OakTable World going on during Oracle Open World, I am really sad that I am not going to be there again this year but there is always next year!  Maybe I will snag a Discover Pass and then just spend a few days at the off conference events during the week.  I mean, it is a plan right?  :}

Celebrating 300 posts!

When the blog started, I had no idea where it would take me but since then I've:

• been promoted
• obtained my Master's degree
• presented professionally for OAUG
• been selected to present for Hotsos
• been published by Oracle
• started supporting Exadata
• seen R12 be installed
• started on Twitter, introduced a regular feature, and fell behind on it as well
• celebrated a year of the blog
• remotely blogged about the keynote of OOW 2013, seen both R12.2.2 and R12.2.3 introduced

What do the next 300 posts bring?  I don't know, I guess we'll just have to find out together!  I'm really excited for what is still yet to come, as I think I've just started to tap into this energy of running the blog and digging into our system to learn more each day.

Catching up on social media

Recently I have been behind on catching up on blogs because of Twitter, but now that I am focusing on keeping my blog fresh and continually updated I'm behind on catching up on Twitter.  That is why when Doug Burns shared this post in September, I was more than a bit relieved that I am not alone in battling the constant stream of information coming at us in many different ways.  The more blogs I follow, the more people I follow on Twitter, or connect to on LinkedIn start to exponentially add to "my conversation" so I am struggling to find a happy medium or ritual to parsing through that data while being able to generate my own content.  What tools do you use to contain the social media flow?  Are there tips or tricks you have to help you deal with the flood?

EDIT: Minor correction as it looks like I didn't finish my first sentence.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Well, not really me but it was a year ago that I made my first post!  If you had told me that I would have posted almost a hundred times, at a clip of just over one post every five days, and had more than a thousand page views, I would've told you that you were crazy.

What's in store next year?  I haven't really thought about it too much, but off the cuff I'd say:

Expanding to other social media outlets.
Reaching a few more "thousand visit" milestones.
More consistent posting.
Return to "Main Tenant" posts.

How do you think this past year has gone?

-The Oracle EMT

Deep thoughts about the meaning of blogging

A recent article made me think a bit about why I'm blogging, what I expect out of it, what YOU are expecting to get out of this and maybe more importantly the future of the blog.  Right now this is my only outlet for social media and interaction with this audience and a year ago I would have told you it would have been enough for me, yet the last few months have had me thinking about ways to change and become more interactive with you and with what's becoming a growing web of social interaction here.

Will this blog become an "influencer" one day?