Book Review: Blog Blazers

I just finished the book “Blog Blazers” by Stephane Grenier. My three word review: “Not too shabby.”

I have to admit this book wasn’t exactly on top of my “to-read” pile. I’m not usually a big fan of blogs/books about blogging, podcasts about podcasting, etc. – it’s all too meta for me. But Ian Landsman was offering a free review copy on his blog, and I’m a sucker for free books, so I gave it a shot.

“Blog Blazers” consists of 40 interviews with popular and successful bloggers, including Andy Brice, Bob Walsh, Dharmesh Shah, Eric Sink and Jeff Atwood. Stephane asked each person the same questions, including:

• What defines a successful blog?
• Do you have any tips or advice on writing?
• How do you market your blog?
• What is your best monetization method?

Because each interview followed the same form it became a little monotonous to read in one sitting. I could only take about ten at a time. Many of the answers were repeated by several of the interviewees, which was a bit boring, but the repetition confirmed that their advice is probably good. Or they’re all suffering from groupthink, but I’ll go with the first reason.

As I read the interviews I asked myself, “So what? Will this change anything I do?” I came away with these thoughts:

• Original content vs. commentary: try to write as much original content as possible, as opposed to just commenting on others’ content. For instance, don’t write book reviews. :-)
• Use your own domain, instead of myfreeblog.wordpress.com or myfreeblog.google.com. That’s next on my to-do list.
• A lot of bloggers get found through StumbleUpon – I haven’t used that in a long time, maybe it’s time to check it out again.

Nothing earth shattering, but it’s a lot of good blogging advice. The book also included a number of blog(er)s that were new to me, some of which are now in my RSS reader.

My favorite quote was from Eric Sink. When asked “How long does it take to become a successful blogger?” Eric answered, “The time varies so much that any answer would be incorrect. I’ll just say this: Some things are not under your control. Persistence is.” (emphasis mine)

Becoming internet-famous overnight probably ain’t gonna happen – the best way to develop a good blog is to be persistent about writing good content.

So there you go – it was a decent read, well worth a trip to the library, and maybe even purchasing if you want advice on building your blog.

Presentation Presence

A software vendor gave a sales presentation at my office today.

The vendor sent two people to present – a sales guy and an engineer.

The sales guy started the pitch with an overview of the software. Sounds great, says us, but we need a bunch of technical details to know if it’s worth pursuing. This is a critical piece of software, it will interact with a lot of internal systems, and so we need to know what we’re getting ourselves into.

So we ask a bunch of questions which the engineer answers to our satisfaction. Probably 30 or 45 minutes go by, mostly a back-and-forth between us and the engineer. He knows his stuff, and he seems to enjoy telling us about their technology.

The sales guy doesn’t have much to contribute, which is fine. Or rather, it would have been fine, if Mr. Salesguy would have appeared to be paying attention, or at least not acting distracted and bored.

Instead Mr. Salesguy checks his email. Checks his voicemail. Fiddles with his pen. Fools around on his computer for a while. Does a lot of things that tell me he doesn’t care about this sale. All with a look of “Get me out of here” on his face. Which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence or help the sale at all.

What’s the lesson here? When you make a sales pitch / presentation / demo / whatever, make sure that every single member of your team is devoting 100% of their attention to the customer. Even if you’re not currently speaking, even if you’ll never speak – act interested! Better yet, BE interested! And if you can’t get interested, then you probably don’t need to be there in the first place.

How to tell you’re a bad programmer

How to tell you’re a bad programmer:

1. You think you’re an awesome programmer.

2. But no one else has ever told you so.

3. You’ve never looked at old code you wrote and thought, “Ewwww! That is horrible code! What was I thinking???”

4. You’ve never looked at someone else’s code and thought, “Dang, whoever wrote this is a freaking genius.”

Note that this also works if you substitute <other profession> for “programmer,” and <output of other profession> for “code.”

If you don’t see growth, it probably ain’t happening.  If you don’t see growth potential, it probably ain’t happening either.

The Old New Thing

Raymond Chen learns from himself:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/11/27/9145565.aspx

I like the fact that he’s honest and humble enough to admit that kind of “mistake.”

A good pro/teacher/mentor/expert should be willing to learn from others, including himself.

Another Reason To Love The Swiss

Swiss elevators start at floor 0:

Swiss Elevator controls

And this Swiss department store starts at -1:

Directory for Manor, a Swiss department store