[xpost] No longer a reluctant blogger after 7 years

I recently got a note about the plans to finally shut down the old BlogCentral blogging site. This was the first internal Blogging platform deployed in IBM and although it is technically still active, in recent years employees have been encouraged to use the blogging service that is bundled in IBM Connections instead.

The old service currently gets very little traffic and so it is no surprise that the service will be turned off - however, since blogs can be a useful historical record there is a plan to migrate content from the old service to the new one. In order to reduce the load on the migration tool, the administrators asked all blog owners to review their blogs and to delete anything that they didn't think should be migrated.

This is the first social networking site that I ever used, so I was a little bit nervous to see what embarrassing rubbish I had been writing back then. I saw that my old blog was called "Brian's Braindump" to reflect that I wasn't sure what I wanted to blog about (not much has changed there), but I was surprised to see that my first blog post was entitled "A Reluctant Blogger", and it was published almost exactly 7 years ago. In this initial post I explained that I didn't really see the point in all of these social networking tools and that I was only establishing the blog due to peer pressure of colleagues telling me that this would be the next big thing and that I ought to try it out.

I suppose a lot has changed over the last seven years. While I might still struggle to explain my own motivation for using social networking tools, I definitely could no longer be described as a reluctant blogger. In fact I suppose that I have taken to the concept with the zeal of a convert. I wonder what I will be writing about in 2020 and what tools will I be using to write it?

Update on SPAM Comments

I notice that the number of SPAM comments being left on my blog has reduced dramatically since I introduced the CAPTCHA test. However, the problem has not gone away completely which tends to confirm my suspicion that the attack is being launched by a semi-automated process. I think that a fully automated process would not be able to breach the CAPTCHA system, but a recent comment (which was automatically detected as SPAM) is a brilliant example of why it must be an automated system:

This blog is wonderful. You are clearly and expert in %PAGE_TITLE%. I have shared this post with all of  my colleagues ...

This could be a boost to my ego because I am proud to boast about my expertise in a wide range of subjects, but %PAGE_TITLE% is not one of the areas that I claim expertise.

Since the CAPTCHA is not being totally effective in blocking the SPAM, I will disable it. Instead I will force users to register for an account in order to leave a comment. In addition I have enabled a rule whereby comments have to be approved before becoming visible on old posts (most genuine comments are left fairly soon after the post is initially published).

Recognising SPAM comments on blogs

Like anyone who has been using the Internet I have often received SPAM emails, but it was only recently I encountered SPAM comments on my blog. The content of SPAM comments on blogs is very different from the content of SPAM emails and so I didn't instantly recognise what was happening - luckily Google has more experience of such practices and they immediately removed the SPAM comments before I even got to look at it.

SPAM emails typically try to trick the receiver to part with some money and/or click on a link which will infect your computer with some malware. The content is not always offensive, but it is certainly embarrassing to read about some of the alleged services being offered. Very few people who read a SPAM email would confuse it with a genuine email, but of course if the spammers send out enough emails they will surely find someone foolish enough to be tricked.

When I first established this blog, I was given the choice of implementing a policy that all comments would have to be approved by me before becoming visible on the site. I decided not to implement this policy because I was not too worried about the type of comments that user would leave. Until recently, my confidence in human nature was repaid and none of the hundreds of comments left over the last few years were comments that I would not have approved if I was reviewing them.


Since the same word is used for SPAM emails and SPAM comments, I foolishly thought that the content would be similar. However I recently discovered that the content of SPAM comments is surprisingly different from email SPAM, because all the authors are trying to do is manipulate their Google page rank by posting a link to their site on your blog. As a result the SPAM comment will deliberately be crafted to look at first glance as close as possible to a real comment.

My knowledge of the topic this changed about a 2 weeks ago ago when I received notification about a few surprisingly complimentary comments left on my blog. These comments were praising the quality of my writing and although I was surprised at how gushing the praise was, I didn't initially suspect that anything untoward was happening (bloggers typically have an inflated self-image and so I suppose it is not surprising that blog authors will often accept such praise at face value). However, when the trickle of such comments grew larger my suspicions arose and I began to look a little closer.

None of the comments were duplicates of each other, but they all followed a pattern. The comments were gushing in praise about the quality of the blog, but they would refrain from specifying what exactly made the content interesting (presumably because the comments were being left by some semi-automated process that doesn't involve actually reading the content). The comments would all end up with a line like "you might also be interested to read my blog" and then they would provide a link to their own site (but of course genuine comments also frequently end with a line like that).

When this flood of comments started, I was on vacation without convenient access to the internet. Therefore, about a week had passed before I investigated and about 40 of these comments had been left. Luckily the Google Blogger platform was intelligent enough to catch all but 2 of these as SPAM without me having to do anything. When I then reviewed all the comments from the previous year and I found only one which was a previous incidence of the same pattern (my naive self was pleasantly suprised at the praise, but my new Jaundiced eye brought me down to earth). So clearly my blog has been added to some list of "easy targets" for comment SPAM.

A sample CAPTHA

In the meantime, the flow of SPAM comments continues to grow even more frequent. Although it is good that the blogger platform automatically categorises them as SPAM and hides them, it is still a nuisance that I can do without. Therefore I have been forced to implement a captcha system to slow the flood.

I personally hate captchas because I find them very difficult to complete (perhaps it is my fading eyesight). However, I think that I will need to leave this defence mechanism in place for a while until the spammers go away to softer targets.

[xpost] Scribefire and Lotus Connections

[This article was originally posted to my IBM internal blog]

A while ago I wrote up a description of how to configure the Scribefire blog publishing tool to work with Lotus Connections. At that time it was necessary to manually specify the service URL and the API type, but in the meantime Lotus Connections has fixed the way that it identifies itself to tools like Scribefire so that now you simply need to provide the URL of your blog (if you are using the IBM internal deployment be sure to use the https:// version of the blog URL) and your username/password - all other parameters will automatically default to the correct values.

However, there is another issue that people will find when using Scribefire with Lotus Connections. It is not really a bug as such, but it is very annoying nevertheless.

When I configure Scribefire to publish to a blog hosted on wordpress.com, the tool automatically configures all of the blogs that I have write access to on this platform. This is actually quite a convenient feature and in any case it only takes me a few moments to delete the small number of blogs that I don't actively contribute to. However, in Lotus Connections, newly created communities get a blog by default and by default all members of the community have write access to the blog. I am a member of a huge number of communities on the IBM internal deployment of Lotus Connections (I am sure this is quite typical for most employees, especially since you can be added to the membership of a community without having to even give your proposal). As a result when I tried to add my personal blog to my scribefire configuration, I ended up with several pages of blogs added to my list of blogs on Scribefire and I had to scroll down 6 times to find the one blog that I was likely to want to publish to.

I have tried removing the blogs that I don't use from my Scribefire configuration, but this is a tedious task since I need to remove them one by one and Scribefire asks me for confirmation each time. I wonder if anyone knows an easy way to remove several blogs from my configuration?

Review of 2011

I started blogging at the end of 2008, so 2011 was my third full year of blogging. So I thought it might be a good time to review briefly my blog activity and life in general.

The number of blog posts I wrote in 2011 was 84, which is slightly down on the 113 posts I wrote in 2010. However, most of the drop is accounted for by the elimination of the weekly reviews, which I started at the start of 2010 and then abandoned. I have settled into a steady rhythm of roughly 2 posts a week and a reasonably stable set of topics involving mainly technology and gadgets.

I am happy with the tone of the blog and the level of interest it generates. The one thing that surprises me is how little I blog about IBM or the products that I work on. I think that the reason for this is not that I don't have anything to say about IBM products, but it is because I need to think more carefully before expressing an opinion about IBM products. For example, I spent almost 3 months working on a recent article for Developerworks while a typical blog post is written is less than a half an hour. I may increase the work related content on my blog, but it will probably involve mainly short posts pointing at more substantial articles that already exist elsewhere on the web.

In terms of life changes, the biggest change in 2011 was my decision to move from a people management role to an individual contributor role. As I blogged recently, I am still struggling to settle in to the changed role, but I am still happy that I took this brave decision. I think that it will the end of 2012 before I will be totally clear on how I feel about the change.


Getting Things Done (GTD) was one of the main topics in my blog for 2010, but it is not mentioned at all in 2011. This is mainly because I have stopped implementing the GTD methodology.  My decision to abandon GTD is because my work now involves a smaller set of substantial tasks to complete as compared to my former role as a manager which involved tracking many different tasks each of which involved less work from me directly.

What do I blog about and why

Recently I was interviewed by a member of the IBM internal communications team for their "meet a colleague" series. The interview, which was published on the IBM intranet went reasonably well, but there was one question that she asked me that I found difficult. She asked me "what do you blog about and why?". The reason why I didn't answer very clearly is because I don't really know this myself.

It might seem surprising that I write a blog without a clear idea of why I am blogging or even a clear plan for what to write about it. However, to understand how this situation arose you need to know how I got started blogging. I initially started blogging on the IBM internal blog platform as part of an effort to understand the usefulness of the Lotus Connections product which at the time we were proposing to develop. My motivation was simply to get a better understanding of how/if people could derive value from using these tools because without this understanding I could not really judge if the platform we were developing was a good one or not.

Towards the end of 2008, I had a discussion about my blogging activity with one of my mentors (who was an avid blogger). She advised me that blogging inside the IBM firewall was somewhat like cycling with stabilizer wheels - a useful training exercise, but nothing like the real thing. As a result of her advice, I established an external blog. Initially I wrote very few blog posts on my external but gradually I gained confidence and now I would say that I am reasonably comfortable with my blogging activity. I still have an IBM internal blog, but I post to that blog relatively rarely because I focus my efforts on maintaining the external blog.

I still can't really say that I fully understand exactly how blogging can provide value for the blogger, but the fact that I am still actively blogging years later is evidence that I must be getting some value from all this effort. In general blogging can be used for spreading information and/or for facilitating discussion. As you will see below, I use my blog for both purposes (with mixed success).

One of the advantages of a blog is that you have a record of your activity so I decided that I would do a detailed analysis on what I was actually writing about and whether or not it was achieving my goals. In terms of spreading information, I guess that it is successful if a reasonable number of people are reading my posts. On the other have, the number of comments left on my blog would probably be a better measure of whether or not it is helping facilitate discussion. Here is the detailed analysis of my blogging activity for the last year (apologies for the length of this post, but since you have read this far you might as well read the whole post):

Why blog on IBM internal platform rather than external blog?: During the last year I wrote 103 posts to my external blog which means that I blog on average twice per week. However, I only posted 6 times on my internal blog . Three of the of the posts on the internal blog were cross-posts form the external one (to increase the chance of IBM employees seeing the post). Of the remaining three internal only posts, two were on a topic that would not be of any interest to someone outside IBM and one was expressing an opinion on an IBM policy. As I said earlier, I knew my external blog was taking over from the internals one, but I was surprised at this statistic. On reflection I should probably redress this balance slightly (even if this is only done by cross posting more frequently).

What do I blog about?: In general I blog about whatever I am thinking about. When a though enters my mind about what would be a topic worth blogging about, I generally create a draft blog entry with that title to remind me. I revisit my blog when I have time available and work on polishing the draft entries until they are ready for publishing. At the moment there are 15 draft entries in my blog, but if I need more than a few weeks to polish them I take this as an indication that I don't have a very clear opinion on the topic to express and so I delete the draft.
I analysed the content of the posts over the last year in detail and I could see that slightly less than half (45%) were expressing an opinion and hence were inviting comments. The remaining posts were split between passing in news about stuff that was happening (35%) and posts which were giving technical information on how to do something (20%),

Do people read my blog?: My first ever first blog post got 7 views, as my blog became better known the number of readers settled into the low double figures. In the last year, none of my posts got fewer than 10 reads, roughly 2/3 of the posts received between 10 and 50 readers and the remainder were split evenly between posts that received 50-100 readers and posts that received over 100 readers. In general I am happy with this level of readership, after all I am not a celebrity and in reality there are ways people can read the content without appearing in the statistics so if anything the readership would be higher than these statistics indicate.

Why do some posts receive a lot of readers?: This is a bit of a mystery for me because sometimes I write a post that I expect to be popular and it gets hardly any attention, but other times  a post will be an unexpected hit. The most popular post over the last year (getting over 1,200 hits) was a description of how I recorded OSSBarCamp and converted the content into a format suitable for posting online so apparently this is a subject that people struggle with. Most blog posts are mainly only read in the week immediately after they are posted, but occasionally a popular post will continue to be read for a long time afterwards. For example, shortly after I started my blog I posted a test entry from my mobile phone. The entry did not have much content because it is difficult to type much on my phone and in any case I intended to delete it once I verified that it was successfully posted (but obviously I forgot).  This turns out to be my second most popular post ever and interestingly almost  all of the readers come from mobile devices (the content describes how I posted from my mobile and hence it is more interesting for this audience).

Where are my readers?: Surprisingly, more of my readers come from USA (4,587) than Ireland (3,285) and my readers come from developed countries all over the world. As you can see from this map, Africa and South America are not at all represented among the readers of my blog..

Does the blog help start discussion?: Unfortunately I get very few comments on my blog. Roughly 80% of my posts get no comments at all. Half of the remainder (10%) get 1 comment an only 10% receive more than one comment. At first glance this is very disappointing and would seem to indicate that the blog has very little success in generating conversation. However, I do find that I get quite a few comments that are not left on the blog itself. Sometimes people will comment on the Facebook of LinkedIn platforms where all of my entries get cross-posted. What really surprises me is how often I will be standing in the queue for coffee in work when the person next to me will turn around and say "I was reading what you wrote on your blog about X and I was thinking ..." - this can often lead to a very interesting discussion.

My blog gets a new look

The blogger platform just released some new "Dynamic Views" and so I decided it was worth trying them out. One of the advantages of using a platform like Blogger is that you get these new features without having to do anything. The new template makes my blog look completely different with virtually no work required from me. Let me know what you think of the new look..

If you click on the down-arrow beside the "Sidebar" at the left of the page header you can even choose a completely different layout. I think some of them look really cool although I must at some stage make a few more tweaks to ensure it looks correct and maybe even add back in a few of my old widgets which seem to have disappeared.

Clean-up of tags

I was looking at the tags widget on the right hand side of my blog and I was surprised to see that I have used roughly 90 different tags on this blog. Many of these are only used on a single post and it makes it difficult to see what this blog is about.

After some consideration I decided the content of this blog could be categorised into the following themes:

• GTD
• IBM
  
• Innovation
• Ireland
• Life
• Mapping
  
• Open-Source
  
• Social-Software
• Tools

I went through the blog posts and found that I could add at least one of these tags to each of the blog entries. I didn't remove any of the old tags (except for mis-spellings), but in many cases the blog post already contained a more specific tag e.g. the post may have contained Galway or Dublin so I added Ireland or if the post  have contained the tag Ubuntu I added Open-Source. The tag Life was used as a tag for everything that doesn't fit neatly into any other categories.

I then restricted the tags widget to just show these main categories. In future I will apply at least one of these tags to all of my new posts. It will also allow me to monitor the volume of blog content about each theme. For example, I see that I have relatively few blog posts about mapping, but this is a topic of interest to me and so I intend blogging more about it in future.

GTD Q1 Review

I have now been doing weekly reviews on my blog for 3 months and so I thought it might be time to asses who effective these have been.

• The once thing that surprised me is to see that I have kept it up - this is surprising becuase I am not necessarily very good at persisting at things.
• I also see that I have mixed results about getting my weekly goals achieved. However, I think that the potential for public embarrassment of having to write on my blog has often spurred me to complete some of my week goals that might otherwise have slipped. For example, I notice that sometimes I have a goal "blog about x" and the blog post about x is posted shortly before my weekly review. On the other hand, there have been situations where I have written "not done" beside an action item a few weeks in a row and this has forced me to be more realistic about the chances of completing this action item and I move it to the "Someday/Maybe" list.
  
• I only include things worthy of mention in my weekly ToDo list in my weekly review. Many tasks repetitive but time consuming tasks are ignored when writing my weekly review. I think this makes sense, but sometimes I am disappointed when I see how few items of note I have actually achieved in a week.
  
• Being a manager means that many of the things I do must be kept confidential - it is not just my privacy, but the privacy of others must be respected. However, whenever I have anything major to do, I normally find that I can write something on my weekly review blog post that makes sense to me and doesn't compromise the privacy of the people involved.
• I don't think my weekly review blog posts make for interesting reading, but quite a few people have commented directly to me that they have read the posts and they have offered encouragement in my GTD quest. (I am not sure why people are so reluctant to post a comment to the blog).
• I don't think I have yet hit upon the correct mixture of tools and process that make GTD work effectively for me, but I  think I am getting closer. I will probably settle upon using Lotus Notes, but with some adaption to make it easier for me.
  

In summary, I think I will keep up the week reviews (at least for now). I am really looking forward to attending the seminar that David Allen and Erik Mack holding next week for IBM employees. I think this seminar will be really relevant to my personal circumstances. In addition I think it is great to connect with other IBM employees who are also struggling with implement the methodology in a way that works for them.

New Template Design

I noticed that it was difficult to read my last blog post because the site template I was using too much space for the decorations at the side and allocated a relatively small amount of space for the real content in my blog. Therefore I switched to a simpler template and I used the new Blogger in Draft Template Designer to tweak the column with to give as much space as possible to the actual blog content.

I think it looks much better now. Do you agree?