Blog Roll Déjà Vu and Storage Monkeys

Ever have blog roll Déjà Vu? If not, go visit various blogs and look at the blog rolls.

While some blog owners do a good job of keeping their blog rolls up to date (for example the Storage Monkeys site) given their interests, preferences or blog objectives, there are also many who appear to simply cut and paste blog rolls from other sites (Not the Storage Monkeys).

Ok, fair enough keeping up with the Jones or whoever the neighbors or rivals are. However it’s also interesting to note how someone may not have taken the time to actually check out what is being cut and pasted from one list to another to see if still relevant or even active.

Hmm, Déjà Vu, kind of like how did a teacher know who was copying who’s homework in school? Let’s leave the copying content discussion for another blog post as that’s another topic altogether.

Spotting this pattern of blog roll cut and paste Déjà Vu late last year, I did a little research and analysis (you may recall, that’s something that analysts are supposed to do ;) ) pointing to a couple of trends.

One trend I saw was that many of those links were either stale, or, the sites they ended up at were stale or had changed to something else, hmm, linking to what others are doing yet not actually following, thus blog rolls keeping up with the Jones. For example vendor to vendor for smash / trash talk discussions or debates. Yet another trend found was that many of the blog rolls were dated as their sites were created for example early on in the blog era, then as the enthusiasm faded or something new appeared, the sites go stale.

I also found that some bloggers/web sites actively update and manage their blog rolls while others seem to take the approach that more is better (kind of like twitter thinking, more followers, more tweets are better?) e.g. qty vs. quality for example seeing some blog rolls that should have a vertical scroll bar or requiring some dedupe processing.

I used to have an extensive blog roll when I put up my blog about two years ago of which the first six months or so I let the blog site lay in stealth, low key mode as I watched, learned and figured out how, when and where I would leverage the blog and where/what I wanted to accomplished with it. Hmm, there’s that analytic stuff coming back again ;).

Now in fairness, want to see some links? Go to my links pages here and here or the portfolio page or checkout twitter (backtweets or other venues), read through some of my blog posts which are filled with links to other sites, venues and more.

As for my blog, I used to have a more extensive blog roll, however I’m currently under the mind set that fewer maybe better, that is unless you are a follower and simply want to show/post what others are doing to be part of the crowd.

What does all of this mean if anything and what’s my point?

Simple!

My hat off to Storage Monkeys, a site that if you are not yet a member, take a few minutes and go register, it’s not a vendor sponsored or endorsed site, nor is it an analyst or media sponsored site, rather, it’s a site put up and supported by folks who are involved in technology as a means for peers to collaborate.

Thus it’s not a vendor centric site, not a var centric site, not an engineering centric site, not a site loaded up with product ads or pitches, not a want to be media site, rather, simply what’s on the mind of the community that is made up of IT pros, vars, vendors, analyst’s media and others.

Congratulations to the Storage Monkeys who did two recent polls or votes to update their blog rolls. One blog roll for vendors was open to public polling/balloting and has lead to controversy given the results. The other poll for non-vendors was open to any registered Storage monkey and while it appears that the membership base grew during the polling with little to no controversy.

One of the things I noticed about the monkeys poll is that given its diverse membership base, some of the names you might expect to see on the poll list were absent, that is, those that might have a stronger vendor following than IT pros. Likewise, some of those on the list that might fare better in a vendor poll, fared different!

What might this mean? Vendors tend to like those who tell them or you what they want to hear or what they want told. IT pros for the most part I find tend to prefer to hear it as it is, sometimes bad news is good news and so forth.

I’m proud to have been named for the first time to the Storage Monkeys non-vendor blog roll having landed in the #5 spot particularly as I view this as a poll of peers (IT folks, vendors/vars, media or other analysts) who are registered as Storage Monkeys.

Congratulations to Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup and Dr. Dedupe) for moving up in the polls and landing in the #1 spot, likewise, let’s hear it for Chris M. Evans (aka Storage Architect) who moved up from the #10 to #2 spot in the polls. There also was some changing of the guard so to speak with three others joining me in the top ten who had not been there before.

Again, congrats and hat off to all of the Storage Monkeys, maybe other venues will jump on this trend to update their blog rolls as well, I know I have.

Thanks to all of those who participated in the polling regardless of if you voted for me or not.

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIOblog, twitter @storageio Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

Technorati tags: Storage Monkeys