Having been a blog reader for a few years, in the industry for 15 years, and a developer for 25 years, I finally decided to jump in to blogging 2 months ago.  This is my 80th post – woohoo.

A few things I’ve learnt in that 80 days…

1 If you want people to find your blog by searching with IT terms:

• Post about the news at a specific event
• Post several posts about the subject over the course of the day – and of course make them useful – this seems to be a good way to stay fresh on something like Technorati
• Post a summary of highlights as soon as you can, aswell at the end of the event, including links to other people that have written about the event
• Be sure to use a variety of tags
• In each post for the day, put the link to your posts with that tag (or to your blog) to encourage readers to read your other posts (which will provide them access to posts you have not yet even written at that point!)
• Posting from lunch time ET to early evening PT seems to get the most traction
• Post in the comments of other people who are talking about the event – don’t be shy about including explit URLs if you have written something useful

2 Mutual linking is appreciated by practically everyone.  Referral tacking is bloody useful.

3 Use a rich desktop tool to blog, rather than a web interface which is usually contraining to some extent.

4 Reply to comments.  It is a pity that there’s no good unversal way to be notified of specific replies to one’s comments in the blogosphere.

5 Keep a ‘notepad’ of blogging ideas, because they can be easy to forget and it’s easy to run dry of ideas sometimes.

So with that said, here are some of the posts I’m thinking about soon:

• The hidden cool kernel features of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft’s Universal Communication platform and gadgets
• Does outsourcing to India work?
• Popfly alpha review (now that I have a login)
• If there’s something you’d like me to (attempt to) do a post on, put a comment on this post, and I’ll give it some thought.