The Blog of Burgher Jon

When I make substantial changes to the blog, I like to make a post to keep readers informed.  While this post only effects those readers who use Facebook, I have to think that’s a large enough percentage to make a post worthwhile.  After toying with the idea for a bit, I’ve finally set up a Facebook page for this blog.  Doing this solved three of my Facebook related problems:

1. I generally have a “let’s do lunch” policy for Facebook.  If I wouldn’t have lunch with you in real life, we’re probably not “friends”.  A few people who follow the blog but I otherwise hadn’t met, have asked to be friends. I do post some of my thoughts to facebook and I post every time I write a new story, so on some level it makes sense to be friends with blog readers.  I also post personal information on Facebook, information that could be used against me if one of my friends, wasn’t so friendly.  Allowing people to like the blog, and consequently get all the blog related news (but none of my personal news) was a solid compromise.  So if you follow the blog but we’re not on a first name basis, hit the “like” button in the upper right hand corner.  If you want to get on a first name basis, drop me an email.
2. Many of my friends on Facebook are technologists and/or Pittsburghers who do actively read my posts.  I get (according to Google Analytics) four or five referrals from Facebook each day.  These are virtually all (probably) my friends on Facebook who click through to see a story they like.  I don’t want to discourage this, but I’ve had a couple other friends who don’t care for either Pittsburgh or technology who complain that I pollute their feed.  Again having a page for the blog is a happy medium.  People who want to see it in their feed can follow it and people who don’t can avoid following it.
3. Facebook through my personal account didn’t have the capacity to be “viral”.  If you liked one of the posts I made to my own wall discussing the blog, that “like” was only visible in our mutual friends’ feeds.  If you have friends that we don’t share who might like to read it, they lose out.  Since the posts are now on a public page rather then my wall, the news that you like a particular post can be spread without privacy concerns.

Like most technologists, I have my issues with Facebook.  However, they build a popular product and continuing to ignore them seemed like an unnecessary alienation of part of my audience.  I’ve made this concession to the Facebook gods, but look for me to remain more active on Twitter then on Facebook.

I’m not publicly traded, nor do I make any sort of profit from my musings here and on Twitter.  However, I still think it’s worthwhile to do a bit of a quarterly status since we (both you the readers and me the writer) have invested quite a bit of time in this little effort.

I’m going to display popular posts, unpopular posts, twitter and usage statistics.  What I’d like from you is to post comments to this page of what you’d like to see in the blog.  This can be topics to cover, guest bloggers to invite, changes to the format, etc…  Anything at all.  I’ll open it up.

The 5 Most Popular Posts (based on Statistics).  This is a little skewed because of the enormous popularity of a single post, but I promised quarterly updates, so here they are:

• The Truly Scary Part About Facebook Open Graph (4/27/2010) – 27,076 Pageviews
• My TV is Better and Cheaper Than Your TV (4/22/2010) – 1,004 Pageviews
• I Topekea’ed April Fools (4/1/2010) – 899 Pageviews
• It’s Time to Treat IT Like We Know What We’re Doing (4/30/2010) – 678 Pageviews
• Lack of Organizational Capability = IT Waste (6/18/2010) – 159 Pageviews

Twitter:

• 189 followers (up 77% from 1/1/2010)
• 1,756 total Tweets (924 in 2Q)
• Approximately 5,024 referrals to the blog from Twitter
• Klout.com score: 27

Usage statistics:

• 38.818 pageviews
• 26,813 visitors
• 28,517 visits
  • 20,009 from the United States
    • Visits from all 50 states and the district of columbia
    • 1,047 from Pennsylvania (about  80% from Pittsburgh)
    • 3,423 from California
    • 1,668 from New York
  • 8,008 international visits
    • 135 foreign countries
    • All 6 continents
    • Including 1 from Iran and 55 from China, I guess I’m not blocked!
• I don’t officially track feed readers, but based on referral statistics, there are quite a few people following that way.

This may sound a tad bit egotistical, but I consider myself a bit of an armchair intellectual.  I thoroughly enjoy nearly-academic conversation about a wide variety of topics (especially technology and business).  The problem is that being a full-time intellectual holds absolutely zero appeal to me.  I love the fruits of productive labor too much to spend much time idling through intellectual thoughts.  Sure, I spend a lot of time researching technology and business when it relates to an investment hypothesis or a current project/company, but I’m not an academic; I can’t justify the time to do appropriate research on my every whim.

Take, for example, the post I made yesterday on waste in enterprise IT.  It involved a chart that showed the progress of IT over the past 40 odd years and the competency level of IT organizations over the same span.  I made that chart in 15 minutes in PowerPoint.  I shudder to imagine the amount of research involved to validate the assumptions made in that 15 minutes; developing methods to quantify the rate of growth of IT capabilities and IT organizational competency, applying those methods to various intervals over the last 40 years, creating a method for quantifying waste in enterprise IT, validating the hypothesis that waste is directly correlated to the difference between the two curves.  If you’re a doctoral candidate looking for a good thesis, feel free to take that one for a spin.  I’d love to read the results, I just can’t justify doing the research myself or even funding it.  While that post has the potential to underpin an investment thesis (namely shorting incompetent IT vendors and/or going long on companies that  are taking advantage of the closing gap), I long ago stopped investing in enterprise IT*.  I suppose the hypothesis is somewhat related to my current project, but not enough to make it worth the effort to validate.

Without blogging, the theory would have been discussed with a couple of colleagues and friends and forgotten on the whiteboard in my office.  With blogging, I was able to share it with the rest of the world without doing the research necessary for it to stand up as an academic paper or even industry magazine article.  I was even able to validate it informally, by seeing what other industry participants that read the blog think of it (one industry analyst informed me of this related editorial that she had written).  It’s this category of communication that thoroughly invigorates myself and other armchair intellectuals.

*For the record, I did this because the level of waste makes it difficult to guess who will succeed and who will fail.  It frequently has more to do with the Rolodex of the sales people, then the actual usefulness of the vendor’s products/services.

I announced a blog roll for this blog back in February.  At the time the stated purpose was:

I think my readers are interested in one of (or hopefully both of) two things; Pittsburgh and startups.  I think I provide valuable insight on both of these and especially their confluence (to borrow a term).  I have decided to keep a very limited blogroll (no more then 9 blogs at a time).  I want these blogs to be the top 3 blogs on Pittsburgh, the top 3 on Startups in general and the top 3 on Pittsburgh Startups.  I will not add a blog to the blogroll unless I find it absolutely indispensable (consequently, there are only 2 blogs presently under Pittsburgh Startups).  I will make posts any time they are updated.

With that spirit in mind, I have decided to make a change in the Pittsburgh category.  Mike Madison is a great asset to the city of Pittsburgh and Pitt’s Law School but he has only posted three times this quarter and every single one of them has been about how little he’s posting.

In Pittsblog’s place, I’ve decided to put another forefather of the Burghosphere, That’s Church.  That’s Church is the blog of Virginia Montanez (formerly known as PittGirl).  The reason I hesitated to put Virginia’s blog on the blogroll when I first created it was because of its light-hearted nature.  Not that I’m never funny, but that I figured that most people who came to my blog weren’t looking for the content in hers (and likely vice-versa).  Recently though, I’ve begun to change my mind about that.  Specifically, her posts around Big Ben and her work with Make Room for Kids (a play room for kids at Children’s Hospital) have made me realize how much a part of the city she has become.  She leverages the base that she has built to improve the city and raise the level of discourse.  Sure, she tells us how her husband plays poker in the shower, but she also induces real change for Pittsburgh and it is that goal that we share.

In addition to That’s Church, I considered two other options for the blog roll:

• Null Space – Bram Reichbaum’s blog is back and it provides excellent coverage and opinion on Pittsburgh politics as well as the occasional great tune.  While I highly recommend you follow his blog, I don’t think it’s the right fit for my limited blogroll.  It’s political coverage is great, but something I generally try to stay away from on the blog.
• Leave the spot vacant.  There are a TON of great Pittsburgh blogs.  The reason I considered leaving it empty was not because there weren’t any great Pittsburgh blogs to put in the spot, but because none of them were a particularly good fit for this blog and my readers.  Ultimately, though I was able to pick one.

Look for Sauerkraut tomorrow.