Odds and Ends

I was amused by the back and forth between Robert Scoble and Kevin Devin this weekend. If you follow through the comments there, and the original post at Scoble’s you’ll see that he didn’t really mean to call all IT workers f***ers, just the one’s who implemented policy, and the IT folks at Microsoft were smart enough to know that’s who he meant.

Well, Robert, when my users call the helpdesk angry because of a policy, or because of a failure of technology, and begin to berate me over it, I understand that it’s not personal and it’s not about me at all and don’t get angry over it. On the other hand, that’s not an appropriate way to treat people. It’s rude, it’s unprofessional, and I take a dim view of people who feel the need to resort to it.  

For the record, our firm blocks Skype, Instant Messaging, Web-based email and has policies against blogging and posting to message boards. When there’s a business purpose for any of those things to take place, our IT staff is more than happy to help you find the workarounds. (If you’re a law blogger, we’ll relax the no-blogging policy for example) If it’s not related to doing your job, we won’t help you at all, and if you decide to try anyway and break something, don’t expect any sympathy from us, or for us not to lock you down even further.

In other news:

I’ve been using Google Analytics for a few weeks now and one trend I’ve definitely noticed, is that most of the actual page views come from Google searches. There aren’t that many people who actually come to the page on a regular basis, but there are a large number of people using RSS readers to follow along. That’s not at all surprising for a tech blog. My other blog has seen a growing audience and has reached the point where it gets more page views than this site does, something I never thought would happen, but it makes sense given the less technical nature of that audience and the relative unlikelihood of their using feed readers. That also explains why the number of comments has dropped off here, since you have to visit the page to comment. Maybe someday Blogger will figure out a way to get the comments included in a site’s RSS feed. That really is my only complaint about having the full feed available, they don’t comment as often. It’s a small price to pay, however. Maybe if I had ads on the page I would feel differently about having a full-text feed. It would be a consideration, that’s for sure.

Of course, given the rapid growth of views on specific photos at Flickr this weekend, maybe I just need to post more cheerleader pictures. Nothing gets the click-through’s, it seems, like this kind of thumbnail:

I think we all know what that says about web-surfers…

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