Names have been changed to protect the innocent….

Decided to be more declarative in the blog title about who we are. It was kind of cute to ask that simple question as the title, but it just doesn’t make any sense if we want to attract folks to start reading what we have to say.

And let’s be honest, it’ll get picked up by google searches much easier now.

Instant Audience, Just Add Water

There’s just one thing that pisses me more than anything else in this modern age of the internet. It’s this expectation of instant results when you produce something for the web. Come to think of it, maybe it’s not isolated to the interweb but is an issue of the technology market in general.

Let me give the example that’s resulted in this post and season it with commentary. My partner in crime on this blog sent me some information about a problem he’s trying to solve for a client. Specifically, doing auth against an AD server for access to Oracle XE. Here’s the link that started this:

http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com/2005/11/using-active-directory-in-oracle.html

He complained that the steps described didn’t make sense and that the screenshots were crap. My response was to have him to go off and write about it via the blog. It’s a typical response to our unresolved nerd conversations these days and my reasoning here is simple: when people start talking about issues, other folks with like concerns listen.

When you look at the the pervasiveness of blogs, you find information and opinions on any number of subjects. Including the subject matter he was concerned with, indicated by the link above. Now granted, the post is old and this may have been the best lead he had on resolving the issue. But it means someone spent the time to talk about it in an attempt to generate more conversation for this particular problem. I suggested he do the same. That way, the next time someone does a search for this particular issue, his post and the other will associate the information together. Now granted, it may be not a tight association but close enough to continue the conversation. Maybe it’ll serve to help someone else in his position get to the solution more quickly. They won’t have to face the pain and hell that is googling for a solution and coming up with a number of results that have to be carefully reviewed.

It would also have two side benefits: start another area of discussion on the blog and get another hit when google crawls us again.

His response was short and simple: Won’t do any good. It’s not like anybody reads our blog…

Jumpin’ jesus on a pogo stick, this shit takes time. Have some fucking patience. You can’t expect to put the minimal amount of effort in a short time and expect stellar results. We’re not Will Wheton or Seth Godin. People find blogs after searching for some interesting bit of associated information that was posted. They continue to read your blog if there’s something they like about the content.

Now we’ve been lazy about posting around here. The blog has been around for a couple of months but we’ve been pretty tied up in other things. We’ve really just not made the time to post and that’s a problem. But he had a sort of epiphany last week and had planned to blog every day. He made good on that for a couple of days and the entries he’s posted have been a pretty decent start on various topics. But we can’t expect to have a 100,000 readers just from the content we’ve produced so far. It’s simply not enough. We need to get more into the system to get the buzz going. We can’t expect instant results for our efforts.

So the answer is time, patience and more content. It’s issue of crafting the effort so that it hits all the right marks and gets folks interested. It’s not isolated to blogs, but applies to all facets of content. Hell, it works really well when you apply that to software. Rushing out the results of your labor before you add a little polish can sink you pretty quickly. But it’s a balancing act between craft and speed.

So please have patience with us and we’ll do the same. I promise it’ll be worth the wait.

First one’s always free…

As I’m plotting the first post here, I’ve got to wonder how many other folks have sat here and pondered their first post.  From individuals, to groups, to companies,  I wonder what would you find if you were to look at the stats on first posts.  As with most sites in this age, it’s obvious that wordpress is grabbing as much data about the users of their site as they can.  So you’ve got to wonder what data they’re pulling when it comes to first posts.

The questions that come to mind are:

• How many people leave the default first post “Hello World”?
• How many people edit it the first post only once?
• How many people spend alot of time editing it to craft the “perfect” post?

I would say that we (The Drink Tank) qualify for the last catagory.  I’ve actually spent the last 45 minutes trying to compose something witty.  Something eye catching.  Something that will grab you.Reality is that I gave up because blog posts should be, IMHO, a bit off the cuff and fluid.  To much composition and editing and you lose the sense realism that I think blogs originally allowed for.  There still is a sense of this from personal blogs but most commercial blogs I’ve read lately are just to well edited.

Hopefully, we won’t fall into that moving forward.  I promise to at least try really hard for my part. 😉