It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, so I’ll just give a quick update on what I’ve been working on.

I’ve still been blogging, but I’ve created a new blog for the Overpass site.  This is a place I can post all of my more technical posts.  It’s located at http://blog.overpass.co.uk/

I’ve been posting to this blog for over 6 years now—everything from personal stories to technical posts.  My friends aren’t interested in what I think of .Net 4, and the developers don’t care that I’ve run a half-marathon.  So, I’ve created a new site for the technical posts and can use this one for more personal posts.

This blog gets between 20 and 50 new hits a day from search engines.  Most are from people who have a problem that I’ve had before and found a solution to.  Nothing gives me more satisfaction than getting an email or a comment from someone who says “I’ve been trying to solve this problem for hours.  Your post really helped.  Thanks.”  It’s nice to think that there are posts I’ve written 3 or 4 years ago that still help some people now—long after I’ve forgotten about them.

I might as well have some of that traffic go to by company site.

You need a blog!

When I started this blog, I was mocked.  “Eric, why do you need a blog?”  Obviously, he thought I had nothing worth saying.  No one needs one.

I think that everyone should have a blog.  Even if they don’t often post.  A blog just a place to put down what you think where anyone can read it.  It’s not like you run a newspaper where you have to build a subscription base and keep readers entertained.  Most of your readers are not regular visitors anyway, but find your posts through a search engine.  Contrary to what these “Social Media Consultants” will tell you, a blog is not always about self-marketing.

If you go to a bad restaurant, tell the world about it.  If you have a good experience, tell the world.  If you get screwed over by a company who won’t give you a refund for a bad product, tell the world.  If you find a cool site online, tell the world.  It’s not likely that people will follow you or read everything you write.  It’s more likely that people will find your post when they are researching things on Google.  Think of it as giving back to the web community.

If I’m thinking about buying a product or service which requires any heavy contemplation, I Google it.  I Google every company to see what people think about them before I go work with them.  If no one has said anything (except the company itself on a crappy brochure site), I worry.

As a person in a technical industry, it’s even more vital you have a blog.  If I ever spend hours trying to solve a problem and finally find a solution in the end, I consider it my civic duty to post the solution online so others don’t have to go through the same trial-and-error process I did.  In my job, I rely on Google and the generosity of people all over the world who have taken time to post their solutions to problems online.  It would be wrong not to do the same.

A blog is not the same as Facebook or Twitter or forums or any of the other social media sites out there.  Facebook is too closed (and it should be).  I update Facebook for my friends.  Twitter is too fleeting.  No one reads a tweet written two months ago.  Forums are more about debate and back-and-forth than about expressing ideas (a dialogue instead of a monologue).  A blog is a place you can write something down and have it stay there forever.

Of course, since a blog is open to all, it’s not a place for pictures of your kids or tell people when you’ll be out of the house.  It’s not a place to discuss personal problems (unless they could help others and don’t infringe on the privacy of others).  But it is a place to express your opinions and relate experiences that could be helpful to others.  I’m surprised more people don’t use alias’s so they can get really personal.  A blog is also a great place to put your CV.

But just because you have a blog, it doesn’t mean you think you’re Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or Walter Kronkite.  It just means you are one of 6 billion people in the world who has something to say.  That’s what the internet is all about.

Anyway, if you enjoy reading the technical posts here, you can now find them showing up on http://blog.overpass.co.uk/

The Tweetup in Oxfordshire went well the other night.  There were people from all over Oxfordshire and from around outside areas like Newbury.  I arrived a bit late, so got there just in time for "Monday Night is Pie Night" (how can an American not attend that?) and spoke with some complete strangers.

There must have been about 50 people there.  The demographic was mostly white and middle-aged and more affluent.  Watching the local tweets, I know that Twitter is a big thing with younger secondary school kids.  But this was not their scene.

The tweetup took place at a very nice restaurant called the Fallowfields Country House.  From what I gather, the owner, Anthony Lloyd, is very big into technology and twitter.  He blogs, tweets, and his restaurant has a nice website.  He is definitely using this social networking trend very skilfully.  I think his use of Twitter and blogging actually brings a lot of people to his fancy restaurant that would not travel out into this village regularly.  I, being primarily a burger guy, would not have entered such a posh looking place on my own, but will probably bring the family back to to this place often.  I didn’t get much time to talk to Anthony, but he set up a nice evening and has a beautiful restaurant.

I showed up a bit late to the Tweetup.  I was working later than I had hoped I would be, so I arrived at the tail end of the networking portion of the evening. 

The natural wall-flower in me fought to take over, but I took a deep breath and jumped into a group of people having a conversation.  This is always difficult.  At networking-type events, like seminars and stuff, there are usually clusters of people standing around and it always looks like half of the people already know each other (they don’t— they are just better at introducing themselves than I am), so you don’t really want to butt into a conversation.  But the alternative is to stand and pretend to be reading stuff on your phone.  So I jumped in there, "Hi, I’m Eric Wroolie.  I’m going to pretend I’ve been standing in your group the whole time and maybe no one will notice."  The conversation always goes to my accent— and that gives me something to talk about.   “Why would you move to move out here?” “You’re not Canadian are you?” “Well, you haven’t lost your accent at all.” When asked what I do, I tell them I’m a software developer (although I’ve read enough to know I need an elevator pitch for this moment –“I work with small to medium-sized companies helping them with outsourcing software development” — but it’s too hokey and I won’t do it). 

I met one dentist who is using social networking to bring in more business and it seems to be working for him.  I met a guy who told me he was a trainer, and since I used to work at Sea World as a kid— I assumed he meant animal trainer, but he assured me he taught sales training and presentation skills.  And, of course at this kind of event, I met other software people.

I sat down at a table with people who all knew each other.  They were members of BNI— a British networking group.  I attended a BNI breakfast meeting years ago, and was sure they were going to try to persuade me to attend another one.  I got the impression they attended a lot of these things all over the southwest.  But most of the people I met weren’t career networkers, so it wasn’t so bad.

It was a nice evening.  The pie was fantastic.  I met some nice people.  Not one business card was exchanged—so it felt lower on the sleazy factor.  If you have a tweetup in your area, it might be worth considering attending.

Tomorrow night, I’m going to attend an Oxfordshire Tweetup at the Fallowfields Country House near Abingdon.  I’m not sure what to expect, but I saw it was coming up and thought I would check it out.  A tweetup, as I understand it, is just a bunch of Twitterers getting together to meet each other.  I follow a few people in the Oxfordshire area (they actually help me by letting me know when the roads are bad or if there is anything interesting going on in the area) and it would be nice to meet them.  I’m not sure what to expect really, but it will be nice to meet some new people.

A few years ago, when ECademy was at it’s prime, I attended a local networking evening.  It was okay, but it was really a room full of people trying to sell themselves and their companies.  I never met so many life coaches as I did that night.  But it wasn’t awful—and i met some nice people who I spoke with afterwards.  I’m hoping that the tweetup is not so business-focused.

I’m looking forward to it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  If you live in Oxfordshire and want to attend, the url to register for the event is here: http://twtvite.com/mkp8da

BBC started airing a very good documentary about the internet a few weeks ago called The Virtual Revolution.  I finally watched the first episode just the other night.  It’s amazing how much has happened in such a small time.

Google was incorporated in 1998 (went public in 2004).  Youtube started in 2005.  Twitter in 2006.  The World Wide Web was created in 1990 with the first web server being created by Tim Berners-Lee in that year.

It was a fantastic documentary and it really makes you think. 

We are still very much in the beginning of all of this.  There are still things to be done that no one has thought of yet.  We still haven’t reaped much of the benefits that the improvements in communication channels will have lent to science and medicine and as much as the internet has changed all of our lives, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what’s to come.

I routinely chat with people in China and India (and back home in the States) while visiting offices here in the UK. In high school, these places all seemed so far away.

This twenty years of the internet will one-day seem like just a blip to us.  One day years in the future, people will talk about how the newspapers and music industries cried foul before they found their own way.  We will talk about the quaint days of waiting for our favourite TV programs to be aired.  Soon, we will look back on Twitter and Facebook the same way we look back on the old newsgroups (it was all so crude!).

The other day I found myself falling into the trap of thinking that everything had been invented already.  Surely, there are no new opportunities out there because they’ve all been invented.  Or, someone is already working on them.  But the truth is that we’ve hardly scratched the surface. 

There are still things that aren’t quite right in technology.  Still loads to do.  For example, as much as webcam chat is fantastic and a nice novelty, it’s still too complicated to get “ordinary” people to use it. 

As much as things change, we still think in old terms.  Artists still come out with Albums, even though we can buy and download only the tracks we want.  Why do we need the album grouping?  We still have business people who think they need to fly thousands of miles to have a meeting in another office, because we haven’t found a method of communication that is better an 8 hour flight.  Too many of us still get up in the morning and drive or take a train to an office building to do work that could easily be done at home.  When we get to grips with some of these new realities, we will start thinking differently and even more innovation will come.

I was reading the xkcd comic strip (if you haven’t read it, you’re missing out—http://xkcd.com), and saw this this strip:

2003 wasn’t that long ago. Or maybe my age is just catching up with me.

photo credit: Yandle

I woke up this morning to about a hundred out-of-office replys in my inbox and junk mail folder.  It turns out, someone is using my Overpass.co.uk domain in an email reply-to and sending out loads of sex-related spam.

I’ve been searching for what to do about this, and it turns out that there’s not much I can do.  Since the spammers are not sending from my server and only using the reply-to, all I can do is hope that it stops soon.

Apprently, this is a pretty common problem.

If you get an email from Overpass, it wasn’t sent by me.

I enjoy Twitter.  It’s easy to update.  The low character limit, rather than being a hindrance, encourages people to start using it who would never think of started a self-serving blog.  It’s easy to put off a quick statement without having to think too much about it.  I find I update Twitter far more than this blog.

I’m getting lots of followers.  This is good for the ego until I look at who they are.  On any given day, I will get a few email like the following:

Now, I ask you . . . how can someone follow the status updates of over 1400 people?  How is it even possible?  Why would someone want to do it?

I get two or three of these type of followers a day.

I’m also seeing a lot of articles on the web titled “How to increase you followers in Twitter”.  It’s like the new SEO.  There are people now calling themselves “Social Media Consultants”.

I suspect that people follow thousands of people so that those people will in turn follow them.  It makes sense I guess– you send more mail when you want to get more mail.  However, there is just something spammy about this.  Maybe they are looking for the top spot in the Twitter stats.

Twitter is not like Facebook where you have to give permission to people so they can see your status.  You can search all tweets (unless the author specifically selects to option to make it private)– so there is no reason to follow 14k or more people. 

A few years ago, I kept getting contacted by SEO charlatans saying things like “I can get your company in the top 10 on Google.”  It was a ridiculous statement.  I asked if they knew what my business did or what keywords I wanted, but they didn’t. 

I now soon expect to be told, “I can get you 20k followers on Twitter. “  But who wants that?