Welcome
August 14, 2003
Web sites suffer from a number of maladies, but the most common one, by far, is atrophy. I have battled this in my own practice. I am so busy advising others on how to do things with their content, that I never get around to maintaining my primary Web site nearly as much as I should. Articles that I wrote last month won’t appear as a link until months from now. Meanwhile, two year old articles—some of them hopelessly outdated—continue to be prominently featured.
So I have decided to try using a blogging tool as a means of keeping my primary site up to date. In addition, I will be trying some new features, many of which are only in the idea phase.
As a consultant and writer, I am fascinated with how much content the average person creates and consumes in the normal course of doing business. For example, I purchased a new notebook computer and began using it four months ago. As of today, the "My Documents" folder contains 2439 files totalling 349 MB of data. My quick analysis tells me that about 150 MB of that content was transferred over in bulk from another computer. The remaining 200 MB has been created or accumulated by me in the course of my work.
That's a lot of content.
One project is pretty typical, I think, of the constellation of content that one creates, consumes, or otherwise accumulates in the course of doing work. For a report that I am writing, I have accumulated 88 files, spread over three folders, amounting to 14 MB of information. My written output—including correspondence, outlines, summaries of interviews and research, and various drafts of the document and its sections—totals 2 MB. The remaining content is source material that I am researching and citing. Most of these are in PDF, HTML, or PowerPoint format. Only one (at 1.4 MB) is a space hog; the rest range from 75 to 300 KB. The final report, without graphics, will probably be around 200 KB, perhaps around 60 pages.
To date, not a single electron regarding this project has appeared on my site or anywhere else on the Web.
So perhaps a blogging tool can begin to solve this problem. Perhaps it can give me an easier, less painful way of bringing content from the hidden world of my C: drive to readers who are potentially interested. We shall see. I welcome your feedback, comments, and response.
Bill Trippe
Posted by Bill Trippe at August 14, 2003 8:35 AM
