I have noticed a nice spike in traffic on all three of my blogs (Kevin Mullins, The Tech Manager, The SysAdmin) an wanted to thank folks for reading and remind everyone that comments are welcome. In particular, my SysAdmin blog has really come on strong with twice as many hits and page view as my other two blogs. Again I thank you and remind folks that I am always open to share ideas and strategies on all three blogs and welcome your help and participation.
I came across a new site that is great for the new computer users. The site is called Tech-Bites and is found here ..... http://tech-bites.com/. Tech-Bites is a combination Web Blog and Video Blog with great content for the new computer user.
Here is a sample of some great samples of the posts and videos that they have produced ....Firefox Basics, Firefox Basics Continued and RSS Feeds.
Check them out .....
For those of you who have not visited in a while, I moved my "Technical Manager's Perspective" blog to http://www.techmgr.net and I have started another blog at http://www.syadmin.net
I am coming up on my one year anniversary of blogging and I am looking to make a couple changes in focus and strategy with my blogging.
I really enjoy blogging and communicating and I know that I have a little following, however most of the folks that have communicated with me are more technical non-management folks and my interest and/or search for improvement is more on the managerial side, which leads to more posts about managerial content as opposed to technical content.
So, in an attempt to maintain both a technical and managerial focus I have created an new blog for system administrators called The System Admin which is located at www.syadmin.net. Notice the spelling and play on sy.
I have moved my Technical Manager's Perspective blog from my www.kmmm.net domain to www.techmgr.net. I am not sure what I am going to do with my www.kmmm.net domain however I will be focusing on both the www.techmgr.net and www.syadmin.net domains in the next few months.
I am moving my blog to a new domain www.techmgr.net . I will maintain both blogs for a couple of weeks to give folks time to change. If you read my blog via a RSS feed, you will need to create a new feed from the www.techmgr.net blog.
I thought I would change the look and feel of the blog so I went with a little more Blue.
Look for more changes in the future.
Keep Smiling
This past week a non-technical friend that has visited my site asked me to better describe web 2.0. I started telling her that it is the evolution of the web from real static pages to a richer more dynamic web filled with dynamically changing content, and includes social networking thru more user involvement and user commentary. I was trying to keep my descriptions simple and I told her that I had seen a couple of Videos You-Tube and I would post them here in an attempt to help with the explanation of Web 2.0.
Jeff Utecht from The Thinking Stick (Shanghai, China) produced this great little video about Web 2.0, check it out ......
Let me know what you think ......
At Oracle World last month, Chief Executive Larry Ellison told thousands of attendees at the Oracle OpenWorld conference last week, "If you are a Red Hat support customer, you can very easily switch from Red Hat support to Oracle support." as reported by CNET. This story has generated a lot of controversy in the Linux camps of the world, and is one of the top story's on digg and Linux Watch.
This direction illustrates the power that Oracle has in the Marketplace. Oracle is doing this to ensure another stable platform for its products, however it comes at the cost of RedHat. How would you feel if you were a developer at RedHat or a contributer to the RedHat distribution. I think one strategy that Oracle could take would be to add resources to both the RedHat and Oracle-Customized RedHat distributions. Oracle could and probably will reduce their Licensing structure for Linux based products in an effort to drive adoption to Linux.
Someone who is in favor of this new Oracle strategy is Dana Gardner at ZDNET who wrote ...
"If Oracle can subsidize the offering of subscription services to an acceptable and open (not too forked) Linux distribution (and these need to happen) through its commercial products' revenues, it will. It was okay for open source service providers to undercut Unix and Windows via their low-cost development and distribution means, right? What's good for the goose …" Follow this link for the complete article
Will current customers really move to Linux ?
For larger Enterprises with Oracle databases, this path needs to be cost effective and supportable. Oracle is trying to bring some credibility to the support side of its products on RedHat, and this may be an good strategy, if they really can provide the support. From a cost perspective, it is almost an even comparison of Hardware and OS choices. You still need to purchase RedHat and a support contract for your products. Hardware cost of Database Platform Intel based servers and Sun Servers are very similar.
So, in my opinion, there is not a compelling reason for Large Enterprise Organizations to move your production database structures to Linux, however this could be a nice strategy for Small and Medium sized businesses.
I have been focusing on work a little more lately, however I did come across a new site and a new browser that I think you should check out. I heard about the browser and the site from the guys at the The Best Damn Tech Show .
The browser is called Flock and it is more of a social browser than Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox. It really intergrates news, rss, and photos and browsing into a community like experience. What I really like about it is the RSS reader that is built into the Browser. It allows you to preview multiple posts, from different feeds, within the same window, enabling you to look at the most recent posts and select that posts that are of interest. Drew Olanoff interviewed Geoffrey Arone, one of the founders of Flock and after listening, I was intrigued enough to go to Flock and download the browser. Although Flock has many capabilities that I did not mention, it is a great little browser and has become my default RSS feed browser.
The second site that I would like to share with you is www.goowy.com. Goowy is a site that allows you to look at Blogs, RSS Feeds, photos, music email and IM. It's a Web 2.0 "Yahoo" like portal that allows file sharing, mail and IM integration. It's a nice little environment for folks who use a lot of email and IM. Although I did not test this, my guess is that this site would be great for those that need IM behind a corporate firewall. Both Adam Plante and Drew Olanoff interviewed Goowy CEO Alex Bard and after listening to the interview, I visited that site and subscribed.
Check it out .....
Blogging, Podcasting, and VideoCasting are certainly new forms of expression and communication that many folks participate in. Many folks understand the value associated with this form of communication, however, my sense is that many in Corporate America do not understand this value.
Most folks that know me know that I blog and listen to Podcast's, some folks read my blog, some make light of it and in some circles I get a sense that some folks think that this is a waste of time and a little adolescent. My thought is that most of the folks that think that Blogging or Podcasts are a waste of time, have not read my blog or any blog and have not listened to a podcast. If they have, the blog or podcast was on a subject that does not interests them.
Reading blogs or listening to Podcasts is just another form of consuming content, like reading the newspaper, or listening to radio. What is better about both is the fact that you can filter out the content that you do not want, and have the content that you prefer delivered to your browser or your mp3 player every day. Most of us in the blogosphere know and understand this, and recently, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania published a report on the state of blogging with comments from many called "To Blog or Not to Blog". The Wharton School reports that
"About 57 million American adults -- or 39% of Internet users -- read individually authored web logs, or "blogs," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which does surveys to track Internet use. About 12 million American adults, or 8% of Internet users, keep a blog. They do so for a number of reasons -- to share professional or personal ideas and opinions, crack jokes, air political views, or comment on current events."
To read more about "To Blog or not to Blog" Follow this Link ....
57 Million American adults reading blogs, 12 million American adults publishing blogs, and that is only in America. Thats an awful lot of content and an awful lot of people. I bet even the most skeptical folks could find something that they like if they took the time to look.
So, why do I blog ?
I enjoy writing and sharing my opinions and professional experiences with others. With 57 million Americans reading blogs, I bet someone will read this.
