Given my previous post – Inviting your input – What do you want to see on this blog? and Michael Lamoureux’s (Sourcing Innovation) comment about collaborating on the eSourcing Wiki, I thought that the best thing for me to do is to lay the background against which I was inviting your (my readers) input.
I’ve been blogging at this site for close to a year now, including transitioning from the old Blogger site to this one. It’s been an eventful year to say the least and the question is how do I make it more so. So here are the facts about blogging somewhere deep down the Long Tail or Long tail – the Wiki.
So here are the basic facts about my blogging history as I see it:
1. Blogging is tough. My original goal was to commit about a half hour everyday to blogging but with a 9 month old son around – that is quite a difficult proposition. Right now, I’m lucky to get about an hour a week to blog.
2. Blogging is parasitic – symbiosis has not happened. Yet! I say that blogging is parasitic because if I dig up the number of times I have reviewed news articles or commented/critiqued the hard work of magazine writers and editors, I’d probably find that such parasiticism looms rather large. I have only kind words for the hosts but if the host dies, the parasites do too. Thus the way forward is to create more original content and that will be at the back of my mind going forward.
3. A few words about the visitors (i.e. You) to the blog: The fact of the matter is that you’re entirely a private person while you surf the web but never before has so much information (at an aggregate level) been made available to a publisher of content i.e. me. In a sense, this is what RFID will do for the supply chain as well even given all the privacy concerns out there.
(a) The split between first time visitors and returning visitors:
(b) Distribution of visit lengths:
(c) The average visit time:
(d) The depth of the visit:
Note: These screenshots are from analytics services culled from Google Analytics and Statcounter. I highly recommend these two services to track stuff that happens around your blog or website.
4. Are you planning on making money from blogging? – At least not initially anyway. I’ve always seen blogging as an outlet for my creativity and curiosity and not as a source of revenue. But as you might have seen on my blog (and perhaps even clicked an advertisement), I’ve Google Adsense on my site. I hope to recoup the hosting cost that I’ve paid and that’s pretty much what I hope to cover from those clicks. However, there are quite a few blogs that do make money on a consistent basis but I’m not sure I want to go that way. (If you don’t believe me – take a gander here : How Bloggers make money from Blogs).
5. Post length matters: I’ve no doubts about this. As the above figures illustrate as well as the bounce rates that I experience (roughly 60% – meaning that 60% of the users that land on my site are not finding what they’re looking for), post lengths are important. I know that I tend to be verbose, belaboring things that most people wouldn’t care too much about but its something I plan to improve on – making posts concise and to the point.
I don’t know for sure whether the above represents, comparatively speaking, a good blogger-user community or not but its something that I’m planning to build on. The natural question becomes – what do you build?
Michael Lamoureux made a comment on the previous post that involved contributing to a wiki – any wiki. That’s something I’m going to give serious thought as well because Wiki provides a platform to build on. The other idea is to actually create a platform – something of the order of a WordPress plugin itself that achieves some of that same wiki functionality.
If any of you have a better idea, please feel compelled to share it with me. Then again, I would not want any compulsion to drive away my readers.
Cheers!
Have a great and fruitful weekend!!
Tags: Supply Chain Blogging, Blogging Facts, Blogging & Collaboration, Collaborating on Wiki, Blogging experiences, Analytics
After my series of posts on three issues in Supply Chain Management (in case you didn’t catch them, they’re here: Three issues in Supply Chain Management 2.0, Three issues in Supply Chain Management 2.0 – Part 2 and Three issues in Supply Chain Management 2.0 – Part 3), I’ve been wondering about the immediate direction this blog should be heading in.
The first thing that came to me is the very kind of Web 2.0 type of technology adapted to Supply Chain Management. Running a close second, is a sort of wikipage or instructions on some of the best practices and methods extant in Supply Chain Management. In the case of the latter, since my familiarity/expertise doesn’t extend over the whole supply chain, it would have to be a joint effort. In fact, it can be a joint effort from scratch to finish – i.e. a sort of Web 2.0 collaboration. But for that one needs a sort of platform not only to collect one’s thoughts but also to display the output. What is such a platform to be? Is there a WordPress plugin that might be a good place to start looking into?
In the spirit of user interaction and collaboration, I’m reaching out to my readers to share what they would like to see on this blog, topics to look into, features that would be useful etc. No holds barred! Send me a note through the Contact page or comments in this post.
Hear ye, hear ye! Michael Lamoureux is hosting this year’s Big Bad Blogger Throwdown at his blog – Sourcing Innovation. Here is the link to the announcement of the cross-posting cornucopia.
Michael makes an interesting versioning idea ala Web 2.0; he calls its Spend/Supply (Chain) Management 2.0. The topic of the confab of posts from a number of bloggers (including yours truly) is to come up with the top three issues that supply chain bloggers blog about.
Or, Eh Mannnnn!!!, What getteth thy goat?
In English, that would be:
- What the issue is
- Why it is important
- What a company can do about it and
- What could happen if its not addressed
I’d better get cracking on them because I hope to have them up next week. Michael is smart enough to realize that you should never give a blogger two weeks. Wars are finished in less! Well, some of them are.
Lastly, kudos to Michael for taking this on.
Tags: Tag, Sourcing Innovation’s Big Bad Blogger Throwdown, Michael Lamoureux, It’s a blogathon, SCM 2.0, Web 2.0, Supply Chain – the next version
If there is something that you should read today that is totally unconnected to the reason why your search query string in Google/Yahoo/MSN brought you to this site or this blog happens to be in your reading routine or for some other reasons, it is this article from the Washington Post – Pearls before Breakfast.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
I’m not so crass as to think that this is a telling story on the state of the culture today (It may very well be) but what is it about the business of living that one bypasses that which is truly moving in life? A culture that is deaf to truth and beauty in one aspect will find that it is deaf to truth and beauty manifest in other aspects of life as well.
But would I have stopped? Now, that is the question of the moment?
Tags: Joshua Bell, Street Musicians, Pearls before Breakfast, Pearls before Breakfast, If it is moving, will you stop?
Since I’ve been very busy with the move that I’m making, I’ve had very little time to spend on blogging. I’m relocating from Green Bay, WI to Fishkill, NY or thereabouts. This last weekend, my wife, son and I spent some time visiting Lambeau Field and taking the stadium tour and I’m pretty sure that we’ll be back there for at least one game.
However, I found that blogging (the making changes to the blog structure part of blogging) is a great reliever of stress. I have been toying with the archives part of the blog and finally I got the Extended Live Archives part to work. This is a great WordPress plugin that I would recommend for any site that uses WP for blogging.
Documentation for how to get this plugin to work is available at 24FightingChicken’s blog.
Take a look at the archives as it is now. In the coming weeks, I will style it in the manner that I’d like but for now it is what it is.
Also, over the last week, I have put in a new Share plugin as well (courtesy of Alex King. You can get the plugins from this page here.)
Tags: Relocation Move, Extended Live Archives, WordPress Plugin
I will be making a job change in the near future – by the end of this month. I have decided to leave my current position in Logistics Engineering at GENCO (a 3PL provider in the US). I have accepted an offer at ILOG as a staff consultant in their FPO group (ILOG Fab Poweops) which is part of the Planning and Scheduling group at the firm.
More as it happens.
In my career trajectory, I seem to be moving from the high level strategic planning for supply chains down into the nitty gritty of real-time scheduling but I think that I will be back up to the strategic planning level in the not so distant future. I think that I will benefit immensely from the bottoms up approach and that’s why I think this is a good move. Moreover, it takes me from the logistics function of the supply chain into the manufacturing function.
Tags: Job Change, Genco, ILOG
I am on the road this week and so have little time at hand for blogging. But as I was flying to the east coast yesterday evening, I had an interesting thought. Change management projects and initiatives have a high failure rate, estimates that I have across put it about 60% failure rate. If anyone has a better number or figure for the failure rate for change management projects, send me a note.
Why?
The principal reason that I thought of yesterday was that change is not a part of the daily work schedule, part of the daily work objective – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” creates a working environment that doesn’t emphasize change sufficiently. Instead change is something that happens when something goes wrong, has gone wrong and now is a festering sore or is about to go wrong and some alert group or individual recognized it just in time.
What I’d like to find out is whether change management failure rates are comparable for firms that have a continuous improvement culture and those who do not.
Tags: Change Management, Failure rates of Change Management projects, A culture of continuous improvement
