After a year of blogging (26 blogs and two bicycle trips), I decided to step back and see what this year has taught me. Having written quite a few “shameless advertising” blogs at VMware and Cisco, my personal blog was finally a breath of fresh air with my new-found avenue to get my own words out. Those who know me know that I like to be a straight shooter, and yet to solve problems in a pragmatic way. There are few home runs and yet few strikeouts, yet the contrast is high.
Now that I have your attention, while that may be true, I found the most popular blogs in order were (top 5):
Your Early Career is a Contact Sport
My VMware blogs – Insights into Cloud Ops
Get Ready for Constructive Confrontation, Don’t Run Away
Insider Insights: High Performing Product Leadership Team
Interesting and provocatively named titles seemed to rule the list. These were also the blogs where I spent the most time on the piece. There is also a weighting towards blogs in the beginning of the year since they had the longest soak.
International Exposure
Well not really, while I received hits from over 35 countries, the lion’s share was from the US, France, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India in that order. Not surprisingly it was mostly from the US. What was of most interest to me is where the traffic came from. I share via WordPress through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and the few folks who actually subscribe for updates. The winner was Facebook with LinkedIn a close second. Twitter followed and surprisingly not that far behind Twitter was Google search. While I did not get very many “likes” on the blog itself (most people reserved that for the Facebook or LinkedIn sites) and I only got 2 formal comments all year, I did appreciate the feedback when it came in and all of it was heartfelt and made perfect sense from the point of view of the person engaging with the blog.
Next Steps for 2017
This being my 27th blog, one would think that I am getting a bit tired of this. Not so. I don’t know if I will hold myself to a blog every 2 weeks, but I do see myself taking on a few new blogging projects:
- Technology and Channel Partner Blog series (with guest bloggers Bill Petro and Justin Griffin joining me)
- A multi-part series on “What Ideas/Works Survived a Decade Long Endurance Test” which will highlight with my colleague Kemal Delic one of our Camelot Days time frames where our team:Properly detected and articulated platform thinking which evolved into contemporary cloud computing, while deep diving on analytics technologies which enabled platform management and in the end, we envisioned the emergence of service sciences as the important subject of study of today’s digital economy; in hindsight, those three elements are logically highly connected and represented correct predictions for the decade to follow.
- Two to Three Biking blog including (hopefully), a daring point-to-point solo trip
- More Product Management best practices, and potentially an ebook on the less discussed aspects of PM
- More in the series of career advice
and who knows what else.
From Chemistry to Clouds 