Virtual Identity Dialogue

Our OTN editor appears to have taken on the mission about how to make Oracle blogs more visible to the external world.

Personally I'm not so sure about the recommendations. I think somewhat the limits of the blog software running blogs.oracle.com are a hindrance (e.g. no trackbacks) and generally the fact that we're all still learning how to follow conversations in the blogsphere the way we might follow an email or forum thread.

However, I offer up another strategy to my fellow Oracle colleagues and non-bloggers in general on what/why to blog and perhaps break down some barriers to the conception we're not a "blogging company".

The strategy/principal is "Keystroke Conservation".  The premise is that if you have a question you get via email (or perhaps one you need to write up to reply to later) from someone - instead of just replying via email - blog it and then send the link to the blog via email (since in reality most people will likely not be monitoring your RSS feed for responses). This way you have answered the question but once it's written in a central place - you've made it more accessible. It's (usually) instantly become easier to find, for others to link to and you to point others to.

And of course you can adapt the response over time.

Now for the tricky part - sometimes this information is internally proprietary and can't be blogged on the Web at large. So hopefully your organization has something internally you can point to. This doesn't have to be any official "blog software" it could be a Wiki (what we generally use internally here at Oracle) but even if you don't have that - it could be as simple as maintaining a document on a shared network drive that is accessible to your workgroup.

But if the information can be shared publicly - with the amazing amount of free places to start a blog (I know - my friend Zed (aka the dude who wrote Mongrel which is relatively famous for Ruby programmers) has teased me about the number of blogs I've had & failed to do anything with :))  - there is very little reason not to.

This Keystroke Conservation principal is something I've been trying to work on. Though it's a bit like my approach to exercise and diet - I'm better than I was but not yet where I want to be.

Thanks to my friend Jon Udell who created the concept and inspired this post.