ProjectProposalNicholasOmann

Alpha's Place

The Reason

This blog was a culmination of my desire to once again be able to throw out to the world my opinions on technology. I have in the past blogged a small amount about news but generally not much. So the purpose of this blog was to give me a reason not only to follow the news in the tech industry but also to put my opinion on the web. In the past my opinions have changed on an almost weekly bases it seems sometimes I was hoping to be able to find a bit more to where I really stand when it comes to technology.

How it was done

I got my general tech news from PC Magazine and Tom's Hardware. At the same time I followed Linux news using Phoronix and Linux Journal and Apple news generally came out of MacRumors. For Microsoft news I mostly followed blogs the two I most often used were The Windows Blog and Paul Thurrott's Supersite Blog. I actually would subscribe to RSS feeds from the sites and then read the articles in Google Reader. From there I would filter out posts that I found interesting and avoided some topics (namely security and pirate bay) to avoid big controversy.

All blog posts followed the same general layout. With the main body of text followed by the "Links" section which can have any number of links but generally just had a single link to the article that is discussed. On a few articles there is also a UPDATE section for when wrote something completely wrong or if something changed since the article took place that I thought was important enough to go back and mark. Also there are a few articles with a "btw" section which basically just explains something in the article just a bit more that I felt didn't fit in completely with the article.

The Beginning

When I started the project I thought I had a good plan. At this time I was mostly just following general news sites and Microsoft news sites. This meant many of the early blog posts are more Microsoft focused and generally are more positive towards Microsoft. This started out by just grabbing the news of the day and commenting on it. Open Source in the beginning was almost ignored. This was for two reasons. First, I had yet to add Phoronix to my reader. Second, nothing was really going on in Open Source at the time. Overall I think it started off well though more bland then it would become.

The Evolution of the Blog

Around spring break I realized that I was lacking some of the other important aspects that my blog was supposed to have. These being Open Source stuff and Apple content. Apple content has always been sparse as the company really doesn't say much so I had little to actually say about them as many of the stuff about Apple was just minor rumors though I did cover major announces like the iPhone 3.0 software. Open Source was not really a topic I wrote about in the beginning of the blog but by spring break I realized I needed to write about it more. This started with my post about the problems with Ubuntu. This was also the time when I realized I should start looking deeper at what was going on with each article and should try and find more of the problems (Good example is Linux hitting 1%). Also around this time I also found an article about auto-parallelization in GCC which I linked to. Oddly this GCC article randomly gets 2 hits a day every few days (This is one of my posts that seems to pop up more).

In the end my blog has evolved into a combination of news, negativity and sometimes I tend to rant about what a company is doing. I like to try and look at a article and dissect it a bit. I try and tell what the major points are and then pull apart the problems. Sometimes this sounds more like a rant. For example today I wrote about the Kindle DX which though I stated a lot of benefits I still feel as though it sounds very rantish in the end.

What worked

Getting really lucky. One of the posts I wrote got linked to on what seems to be a major ruby developers blog. In 48 hours the post that I had written that was linked to by Wordpress's similar posts had surpassed my most read post by 100 views (my most read post was most read do to the amount of time it has been up). Sadly this has not lead to many of the people coming back since after a few days the number of hits has gone back to normal.

Following rumors seems to have been a good way to get search hits. The best example for rumors is the Zune HD rumor which got me lots of hits for about a week. During this time I was even getting hits from inside Microsoft (I know this because people were being referred to my site by kumo.com which only works for people on Microsoft's network). Even after the ZuneHD was confirmed by Microsoft there was still quite a while where people were viewing the main article I had written on it. I think this was mostly people trying to find more information about the device. The second big rumor I wrote about was the Palm Pre release date. This still gets hits today as people seem to be always searching for the release date for the Palm Pre.

Following a mainstream story also gets hits. I tried to stay away from the big mainstream articles as generally they don't have much to do with tech but with the Conficker scare at the end of March I felt I should post. When I made the post I wasn't expecting to many views. The post which was about how bad companies were messing up with Conficker got as many as 20 views in one day which was pretty large.

Going against that grain helps get hits and readers. Some of my bigger articles were also saying stuff against the grain the best examples are my article about Microsoft's netbook claims and my reoccurring FUD-Watch (FUD means Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) articles. In my article about Microsoft's netbook numbers I explained the problems with their reasoning with the claims they make in an Windows Blog article. This actually was popular enough to even get a few comments. This was also the beginning of my FUD-Watch articles. Some of the articles are labeled FUD watch some aren't but for about a week Microsoft was making some rather bold and sometimes outright wrong claims about both Linux and Apple. During this week I was trying to point out the failings in this. The biggest one was about Apple and the supposed Apple Tax. Even though many believe there to actually believe that the Apple Tax is as steep as Microsoft claimed I seemed to get quite a few views when I break down the costs and come up with a much smaller number then Microsoft.

What didn't work

Some of my more personal articles failed to grab any attention even when I thought it would have a good number of people interested. I believe the best example of this is my articles on the evolution of media players. This article was based on my past MP3 players but the main point I was trying to get across was the evolution of them and the designs. This was also my only post to really use pictures as it was the only one that really needed pictures. This furthered the disappointment it got few views and I had spent much more time on it then other posts.

Another thing I tried was seeing if I could use my blog to get some attention to my thesis project (AVM). This though seems to have been largely ignored. The posts relating to AVM seem to have gotten almost no views which was disappointing. At the same time though it did not seem to actually negatively affect the blog which was good news. People reading a blog seem to be more willing to ignore posts then I thought.

Getting comments. I was hoping that with more negative posts I would also get some more comments either agreeing with my points or saying I was wrong. Oddly very few posts actually got comments though generally they came on posts that were generally negative I am still surprised at the lack of comments on my blog. I still am curious as to the reason I don't get comments. The main reason I am thinking may just be the fact that I don't really have many readers visiting the site and most viewers I think are using RSS readers to view the posts.

What I would do differently

First off I wouldn't do a news blog that needs to post as much in a recession. I had quite a few posts that I really felt I didn't want to write and was only writing to fill in this class requirement. Most of these posts were my shortest (100-150 words) and were something like "This is a article to check out." Also I was rarely able to have a 6th day of the week which I posted since I rarely didn't cover all the news I wanted to during the week.

Also I would have liked to have done more reviews. Sadly when I started there really wasn't anything new coming out for me to review and I wasn't using Linux which in the past I have reviewed. This lead to there being very few reviews (The only one is about Windows Live). So one thing I would have liked to do was run Linux distributions in a Virtual Machine to do real tests or have some beta software to play with. I did not have time though for this type of testing and in depth look at stuff.