by Ron Miller

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're Not a Lesbian Activist

Image by syriana2011 via Flickr

The revelation that the 'Gay Girl in Damascus' blog was actually a hoax could have damaging repercussions to other activists trying to get the word out on repressive regimes throughout the world.

Read my full commentary on Internet Evolution.

DaniWeb TechTreasures Blog Passes 1 Million Page Views

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I'm thrilled to report that my TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog on DaniWeb passed 1 million page views on Sunday on 240 posts. It's a huge milestone and it makes me so proud to have reached it.

This is even more remarkable when you consider that on Dec. 30, 2008, I posted a State of TechTreasures report and wrote: "Just today I passed 186,000 hits on 99 posts."

Just a year later, I passed a million. That was a heck of a year folks. And I want to thank you for reading and visiting my blog.

Blog Milestone: By Ron Miller Passes 1000 Posts

I looked at my stats yesterday and learned that some time last week, I passed 1000 posts. In fact, I'm up to 1007. When I started this blog way back in 2003 after a trip to the first business blogging conference in Boston, I have to admit I was extremely intrigued at the thought of a medium that provided me with my  my very own personal publishing platform and I set out immediately to start one, but I wasn't thinking numbers, and certainly not 1000 posts.

My first attempt at this blog was with Blogger, but after several months I moved to this TypePad blog because I liked the templates better. Earlier this year I hired the fabulous Doug Eymer to design a custom template for me, the one you see here.

The blog has been through a lot of changes over the years. I've blogged about a lot of subjects. More recently I've used this blog, more often than not to point to other paid blogs and online content I've written, which seems somehow appropriate given the blog's name was inspired by my byline, but whatever happens, I won't be giving this up.

When Walter Cronkite died last week, for instance, I wrote a tribute here. When I come across something that doesn't fit in my other blogs or publications, I still use this as my own personal publishing platform and I still love it just as much as the day I discovered it 6 years and 1007 posts ago. What could be better for a writer than a platform to publish whatever I want whenever I want.

Here's to the next 1000.

Photo by M-louis on Flickr

A Month to Remember on DaniWeb TechTreasures Blog

I had myself quite a month last month on my DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog:

• I had most pages views ever: 95,624
• Best Post ever - A Curmudgeonly Look at Google Wave: 46,090 (and climbing)
• Best Week Ever: 52,024
• Most RSS Pulls Ever: 8,511

The only downside of a month like this is trying to replicate it, which will be very difficult to do, but for one day at least I can sit back and enjoy the achievement, then it's back to work.

Photo courtesy of terren in Virginia on Flickr.

Anatomy of a Blog Post

This morning I published a post on DaniWeb called Here's Why Google and Twitter Belong together. I thought it might be interesting to explain how I got the idea and how this blog post came to fruition.

Yesterday afternoon I was working on the AIIM Conference Preview issue for FierceContentManagement. I was writing on one monitor with TweetDeck open on the other when I spied this tweet from Pete Yorn:

ahh thanks....twitter...better than google? it' like "ask the audience" lifeline.

That got me thinking a bit. I opened up Evernote, chose my Blog Ideas notebook and copied and pasted Yorn's Tweet into the notebook. I jotted a few notes and left it at that.

A few minutes later my daughter texted me that she needed a ride, so I hopped in the car and began driving and that idea I jotted down began percolating. I imagined myself at a party with Eric Schmidt suggesting he buy Twitter and I began formulating the opening of my blog post.

When I arrived at my destination, I pulled out my iPhone, opened the Evernote app, chose voice note and recorded the beginnings of my opening so I wouldn't forget. I came home and later that night just before I was going to go to bed, I opened Evernote (which had since synced with my iPhone app), listened to my recording and had to write the post right then and there.

I opened Google Docs, began writing and about a half hour later I had the post written. It took some tweaking before I opened my DaniWeb CMS this morning and copied it and pasted it in, formatted it, added some links and published it. In fact, the original title was "Here's Why Google Should Buy Twitter," but I didn't think that truly captured the essence of the piece, so I changed it just before publishing.

Ideas can come from anywhere. This one came from a simple Tweet that got me thinking.

Photo Credit: Patrick J. Lynch on Flickr.

DaniWeb TechTreasures Blog Reaches Monthly Milestone

 

Photo by Gregory James Walsh on Flickr

My DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog reached some milestones in February that I wanted share with you:

• I had my best post ever hitting the page view lottery with over 18,657 views (and climbing) for Windows and LInux on the Same Laptop? You Bettcha. The popularity was powered by being picked up by Slashdot and sitting on the Slashdot front page for most of the day I posted it.
• On the strength of that 18,000 plus hit post, I had my best month ever with 53,157 hits. This was the first month since I began writing this blog last April that I crossed 40,000 and 50,000 views.

Local School Committee Blog Becomes Budget Battle Flash Point

The times are tough now, just getting tougher
This old world is rough, its just getting rougher
Cover me, come on baby, cover me
~Bruce Springsteen, Cover Me

A local school committee member who started a blog called My School Committee Blog has become the source of controversy over an entry where she advocates closing one of the elementary schools. Truth be told the rest of the blog appears to be rather benign, but when blogger Catherine Sanderson chose to express an opinion in her blog, she became a flash point in our town budget battle.

My home town is no different than any other these days, facing massive budget short falls, town officials are forced to make hard choices, and as always seems the case when times get bad, people start looking for somebody to blame. The letters to the editor in my town weekly are full of frustrated and angry people who don't want their favorite program cut. And who can blame them.

If I recall correctly we are on year 3 of massive cuts and the schools, the biggest part of the budget bear the largest brunt. One proposal this year has called for the closing of one of the elementary schools, which as expected doesn't sit well with the parents, teachers and school officials who call it home. So when Sanderson wrote a blog entry suggesting closing this school was the most sensible choice of all the hard choices, people got angry. She responded in her blog and a debate began about blogging officials.

Sanderson has a right to blog. She makes it clear up front in the blog why she blogs and what she will and won't write about. She has a right to an opinion and a blog is actually providing more unfiltered insight into the thoughts of town officials than we are likely to get through the local town weekly.

I don't think this is really about her blogging. I think it's about frustration with the funding system. It's the same everywhere I look, but suggesting an official can't blog (express their first amendment rights) to me is just silly. You might not like what she has to say, but she has a right to say it and you are probably getting a deeper understanding of her views and decision-making process than you would otherwise.

Photo by bjorndv on Flickr

All in All, A Good Week

I got a lot of good news this week and I wanted to take a moment to share it with you:

Churchill Award For FierceContentManagement Newsletter

I heard from my publisher at FierceContentManagement that the company had acknowledged my work by giving me the Churchill Award for Editorial Excellence. They announced the award at a company meeting this week. I was pleased and honored to have my work recognized in this way.

Invited to be a Judge for Alfresco Customer Award

I also was asked this week to be a judge for the Alfresco Customer Award. I'm not sure what this entails yet, but it should give me the opportunity to learn more about Alfresco customers in-depth which I hope will give me some deeper insight into the needs of content management customers in general.

Started Tech Connections Group at TwitterDoIt.com

Lisa Johnson, who runs the new social networking site called TwitterDoIt.com invited me to join and start my own group and I accepted. I'm now running the Tech Connections group where we discuss technology subjects. Please come on over and join us. I run discussions and post a blog entry or two per week. And there's lots of other interesting stuff to learn about there too while you're at it.

Invited to Speak on a Panel on Social Media

I was invited on Friday to particpate on a social media panel for the Hidden Tech Group. Not surprisingly I'll be discussing how I use to social media as a freelance writer to promote my work. I'm very excited about it, especially since one of my goals for the coming year was to begin speaking publicly, something I've been shy about doing in the past.

So you have to admit, all in all, it was a pretty good week for me and you'll have to excuse me for tooting my own horn.

Photo by Ron Miller: Stepping Stones, Cape Cod, MA

Beginnings and Endings

Another year over, a new one about to be begin and I found myself with nothing to write about this morning. Maybe it was my ongoing odyssey with Verizon, which has me down, or maybe the holidays always seem so anti-climactic to me, so much build-up and then so quickly, it's over and a new year begins. But when it comes down to it I have a lot to be grateful for this year.

This year has been exceptionally good to me. In a time when the economy has been going bonkers, I have steady work. This year I started writing the TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog on DaniWeb, a gig I truly love and for which I am incredibly grateful. I also began editing the FierceMarkets newsletter, FierceContentManagement, which lets me get deeply into an area I have covered for a long time and I also love having this weekly outlet.

I continue to be contributing editor at EContent Magazine where my editor Michelle Manafy gives me interesting and challenging assignments and lets me delve into them in depth.

My freelance technical writing business is also doing well with a very steady client and one who comes around every couple of months with work. I've got nothing to complain about. Sure, all this work can be stressful, no doubt, but it certainly beats the alternatives and believe me I am not complaining.

I sometimes worry that it will all disappear just as quickly as it came. I'm not used to these steady gigs. Although I've been freelancing for 20 years now (wow, that's a number that's hard to believe), my work has usually come in bursts. Several months of hard work, then a steadier pace, then another burst. With three steady jobs, there's no break in the pace, but again, I enjoy each of my tasks and if they all did go away, I would do what I have always done: go out there and knock on every door until a new opportunity presented itself (by hook or by crook).

Next year is already looking promising. I'm working with a designer to redesign this blog. Look for a whole new look in the next couple of months. And I'm working with my good friend Julie Roads, who is proof positive that you can make dear friends online with people you  have never met in person. Julie and I are working together on an eBook that we hope will be ready by the end of the first quarter (maybe sooner).

So while I might have been momentarily depressed this morning, I've got a lot to be happy about moving forward. Nobody knows what the future brings, but for now at least, it's looking good. I wish all of you a happy, healthy and prosperous new year, and I want to thank you for reading this blog.

Photo by Tomma Henckel

The State of TechTreasures Report

Image via WikipediaThe State of TechTreasures Report - DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller

With an incredible stroke of luck and happenstance, this is my hundredth post and my last post of the year. It seemed to me the perfect time to step back and assess my first year writing the DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog.

Just today I passed 186,000 hits on 99 posts. My best month in terms of hits so far was last month when I had 36,035. My most popular post was Alfresco-Adobe Pact Push Open Source Toward the Main Stream, which passed the 8200 hit mark this morning followed by Google Exec Hints at Future Open Platform, which sits at 7940 as of this writing. Both of these posts, not coincidentally, were picked up by Slashdot. Read the full report on DaniWeb.

Image by Soare.