This year as I write my post observing my blog’s anniversary, I am hit with conflicting realizations. One is that I cannot believe that it has been four years already. It seems like only yesterday I wasn’t blogging and I was just another local hack consultant.

Now of course, I am a hack on a much larger scale.

The other thought process is that when I go to events it seems like I’ve been doing this forever. When I started this blog, blogging in the Documentum space was thin. There were some other Content Management bloggers, but it wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is now. It used to be that if you blogged about Content Management, you made the blog roll. Now things change so much the roll has been sitting half-way through a revision for several months.

I started during the days when Johnny Gee was the only widely known Documentum blogger. That does seem like forever and an ago. Over that time, the Word has come to define who I am in the industry.

So, who is this annoying hack known as Pie……..?

More Than a Shoddy Logo

Like many of you, I’m a consultant. I’ve been a product manager for a Documentum add-on product for annotating PDFs, AnnoDoc, and I’ve had the joys (pains?) of working in the commercial and federal space here in the States. I have interests outside of Content Management and I’ve shared them in some posts in the past (10 Things About Pie and My Bucket Item are two).

Like you, I am subject to burn-out, ranting after consuming too much caffeine to compensate for a massive lack of sleep, and making the mistake of listening to Peter Monks. Even sometimes make the bigger mistake of encouraging him.

This past year, I shared some of my burn-out with the crowd. I realized during the continuous process of trying to expound on the concept of Enterprise Content Management that I had pretty much said it all. Most of my readers are on the same page as on which I am sitting. To top it off, the ability to successfully execute “traditional” ECM is so fraught with risk that it is better to target business problems. By the time ECM becomes easy enough to try universally, we’ll have moved on to Omnipresent Content Management.

Of course some people read that post and assumed I was quitting the blog. Not yet (they aren’t so lucky). There is still a lot to say. Identity Management is one of the more pressing interoperable issues facing implementers now that CMIS has grown some wide-spread adoption. I also have to harass vendors when they throw a silly vision out there, fail to create a vision, claim to do more than they can, or generally fall on their face.

Generally I plan to be moody and annoyed and focus on on things that I run into or find interesting. If I don’t cover it or criticize someone, don’t read anything into it. It just is.

After all, this is just a hobby. It helps my work, but I do it because I enjoy it. If I didn’t there is no way I could keep this up. Blogging is hard work.

Observations On the Past Year

Not going to throw numbers at you. They only mean something if you use the same tool to measure them.  Like most blogs that maintain a consistent output, my readership is growing. What is surprising is what they are reading.

• Did you know that my most read post in the past year is a piece I did on The Negative Impact of Social Networking on Relationships? When I say most, that means more than the next two posts combined! It’s daily average for the past few months has been 2-3 times higher than the average the month it was released. I looked and only found one post that even equaled their 1st month’s daily average. On days when I haven’t written anything, it is usually my top post for the day.
• The next five posts in the list involve Gartner or SharePoint. At least if I ever wanted to get more readers I know what I need to talk about.
• Commenting is way up. I’m achieving a 4:1 ratio. Now a chunk of that is links, but still, a definite improvement. Nothing makes me happier than a constructive dialog on a post.
• I write a lot of evergreen posts, aside from the first post in this list. That’s not to say that I didn’t write some useful or good stuff, but most of it has an expiration. Not being as good of a writer as Lee Dallas over at the Big Men on Content, I’m going to have to work at it.

Just to demonstrate how fleeting even a popular post can be, let’s look at last years summary of EMC’s strategy, or lack thereof (Don’t read without reading the changes in EMC’s strategy shared at EMC World). It quite possibly had the most hits over a two-week span as any post I have ever written. It really isn’t even close. In the year after that, it ranked 24th among posts. To write one that endures, that is something to strive for when setting goals.

So the answer is obvious, I should stop talking about Documentum to get more readers. On the other hand, I can ignore all those numbers and speak to the smaller numbers, but the numbers that have the greatest impact on my professional life.

Of course, I’m not going to do either. I’m just going to continue writing as the inspiration takes me. Unlike past years, I’m not going to make any predictions for the next year. I know it will be an interesting year, but I don’t foresee too much earth-shattering.

That’ll come the following year. 🙂