It’s Official… New Blog is Online

Head on over to my new home on the net – http://rickmahn.com/. I’ll be keeping this blog alive, but don’t look here for new content – from here on out, all posts will be on the new site.

RickMahn.com RSS

Another good blog…

While reading a post on Om Malik’s blog, I found Kent Newsome. Kent’s got some great points in his post about Scoble and getting A-Listed. I’m always fastenated to find out more about people who share some of my interests, some of the struggles in blogging that I’m just coming to understand – others have been experiencing for quite awhile. LIke trying to generate traffic and get better page rankings in Google, Yahoo, Techorati and the like.

I’m adding Kent’s feed to my RSS Reader (Pluck), alongside some of my other favorites. While I’m just starting to get an understanding of what A-List bloggers are or aren’t (both viewpoints are interesting), following the discussions in the blogosphere are really leading me to new and interesting bloggers that I was not aware of, so thanks to everyone for that!

Technorati: Kent Newsome, Blogging, Blog A-List

The Rickster

Ok, I’ve been a little lax in posting the last day or two – I’ve been working on my development WordPress site. What I’ve got in the works is to launch a professionally hosted WordPress blog named “The Rickster” that will be my main online presence. One where I’ll post about blogging, the Internet, work, life, and all the rest. Currently I’ve got a Blogger blog where I post news and technical items, and a WordPress blog where I tend to talk about anything, though its mostly releated to blogging and the technology & contemporary thinking behind it.

So to get that done, I’ve been in a crash course in WordPress, PHP scripts, CSS files & formatting, and all the rest that goes along with learning a new system top to bottom, inside & out. I’m sure I’ll miss a few things, but I’ve found the format I like, customized the theme to include some additional items I want, identified a new domain name (more later) and a hosting service that I belive will work just fine for the new site.

Any suggestions on this site, or my blogger site on what works, or doesn’t work – just so I can work them into the new one? More deatils to come as I get the kinks worked out.

Technorati: Rick Mahn, WordPress, Blogger

The Growing Blogsphere

According to a study released Monday by Technorati, the tagging service is now tracking in excess of 27.2 million blogs web-wide. Also, its indexing over 75,000 new blogs a day with the update frequency of the average blog to be the same of around 50% after 3 months. Around 2.7 million blogs are updated at least once a week. Also on the rise are spam blogs which Technorati is taking a part in combating, and tagging which is of course Technorati’s forte.

You can view the report on Technorat’s blog.

via: BetaNews

Technorati: Technorati, Blog

Russ Going Old School

Russell Beattie has gone “old school” as he puts it in his blog this weekend. He mentions how much time responding to comments takes up, and I’m sure it is a time-sink though I don’t have as much experience with that sort of blogging traffic.

Russ, in case you’ve missed it, there is a new comment-tracking tool that is currently in limited beta called coComment, and may be of help to you as you deal with comment overload. Interesting timing actually, the anouncement of this tool and your decision to turn comments off on your blog. Well I hope it goes well for you, and you find that extra time you’re looking for. In many ways, I don’t blame you, but I’m sure that you’ll get some feedback on the negative aspect as well. See ya round!

via: Russell Beattie Notebook

Technorati: Russell Beattie, coComment!

More w.blogger customizations…

I’ve made another step in functionality using w.blogger. Using the Custom Tags feature, I’ve been able to program the bulk of the Technorati tag fuctionality shown below in this post. In previous posts, I’ve crafted them all by hand. It is not fully automatic, however it takes the bulk of the work out of each tag that I add to a post including the icon and the text formatting.

I’ve been teaching myself the structure and layout of WordPress so I can program my own site. I’ve got a full install of WordPress on my own server at home with its own ‘net URL for complete testing. As soon as I believe that I’m up to speed enough, I’m going to set up a hosted version of WordPress so I can use all the functionality of the product. WordPress.com is a bit limited in options at the moment, even though the performance is fantastic.

Technorati: w.blogger, WordPress, Tagged Internet

Blogger.com having issues?

It seems that Blogger.com is having issues at the moment – too bad, I was just going to post on the recent news about VMware’s announcement that their VMware GSX product was going to be released next week as a free tool to compete with Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 product. Guess I’ll post it here instead – can’t wait for this myself, as I’m more interested in running VMware than MS Virtual Server/Virtual PC. I’ve got a virtual system at home hosting a full WordPress installation so I can use it for testing different things before trying them here – very useful!

 Technorati: VMware GSX, Microsoft Virtual Server

Work Blogs

Today want to talk about Work Blogs, or blogging within a work environment. There is some small discussions at work right now about blogs and wikis, and if they are useful tools for our corporate culture. Traditionally, we are like many companies in that we don’t jump on the latest trends in technology just because it may be ‘cool’, but in recent years we have invested more time and resources in leveraging the best technologies for the business and its employees. Thats not to say that we are up to date on all things, one of the areas that could stand improvement in-house is communication, again like most companies.

There are many opportunities for simple communications all parts of the business through blogs – whether their individual employee blogs where workers can post on topics of the day, or departmental & group blogs where workers can post on a common blog about status within a team and so on. Project related blogs are another option, where project team members would be able to post on status, issues, remediation, solutions, communications, costs, ideas, etc… The point being that the potential is endless for more simple communications with a company.

If I could point to one post on one blog that I belive speaks to the importance of corporate blogging today this is it. Written by Richard Edelman, it speaks from a PR point of view from someone who is quite well known in that field.

I’d like to invite anyone from my office to view my blogs and see what I do on a personal side with blogs. Its my outlet for ideas and conversations. I’m not into keeping a diary or journal, and don’t feel comfortable posting my “most inner secrets and fears” to a blog – or grips either! The last thing I think someone wants to read about in a blog is how bad my day/week/life is – who cares? But the release of a stream of ideas that someone (hopefully me) can leverage and move forward is a power tool, and I want to be right in the middle of it.

What I’d love for my supervisors and managers to take away from by personal blogs here on the ‘net is that they should be “transparent” as many in the blogsphere like to say. Naked Conversations by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble is one book I recommend to anyone contemplating work blogs & corporate blogging. This “transparency” is the true power of a blog, whether its for an individual, team, department, or company – simple clear honest communication will leverage the time and resources invested in blogging – anything else will be a disappointment in the technology in my opinion.

Please visit Rick’s Ramblings, a Blogger blog where I cover tech news and my thoughts on technology.
Of course there’s this blog (Rickster) here at WordPress where I talk about many random things on the use of technology, though it seems at the moment that I’m rambling about blogging quite a bit here.

Technorati: Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Wiki, Robert Scoble, Rick Mahn, Richard Edelman, Naked Conversations, WordPress, Blogger

w.blogger working!

Finally, I’ve got w.blogger working, I found this support page that lead me to the correct settings to get the client logging into WordPress. Very happy now, just need to be able to forward my domain to WordPress and all should be good.

Technorati: w.blogger, blogging, XML, RPC

Blogging for a living…

It’s an interesting concept, and while I don’t believe that I’ll be making a lot of money at this for a long time, the aspects of pushing the boundaries of business communication really interests me.  I’ve been working on getting some pieces in place for consulting services for awhile now and I belive that I’ll be adding blogging as a service along with messaging, systems management, and other traditional IT consulting services.

The idea that businesses are waking up to the idea of direct communication with employees and customers has a huge potential that I’m just starting to truly understand.  My biggest question as a corporate employee at the moment is – do these businesses really understand what blogging will bring?  Do they truly understand that blogging will bring transparency to their communications faster than they will be able to adapt, and may make traditional businesspeople nervous?  That what is today considered internal communications are so much easier to communicate to those outside the company?  I don’t mean intellectual property – that can be pulled out of any unhappy employee.  What I mean is daily communication that happens as easily as talking at the “water cooler” with your coworkers.

 It’s a new communications universe that is exciting to me because I see the opportunities it brings, but it may be frightning to those traditional coporate-minded execs.  Some will see the light though and leverage it to grow their business.  That will be good, because it could be growing mine!