Trying for brilliance, measuring for sanity....

It's been a while since I posted...sorry about that. I don't normally post on Mondays but since I've missed a week, I felt it best to just dig in and let the brain juice separate from the brain pulp. (Did I mention it's HOT here in Seattle? We are melting).

Lately I have been obsessed with the cleaning and sparkling part of community work. That is, removing the comment spammers from blogs.msdn.com. Deleting the spam posts from Gotdotnet By the way, the GDN community ROCKS - they always tell me when someone isn't playing nice and then I get to smite them, low, with the mightly delete button of admin super-powers! :-) ). The sparkling part are the metrics reports; trying to make sense of how many visitors and what they did while they wandered the community applications MSDN oversees or has affections for. I know there are diamonds in the numbers, but you gotta dig through a lot of carbon to figure out what they are. And it's hard to quantify “community“ in the first place.

My predecessor was fond of saying to people that community is like marriage - yes, you can describe the qualities that attract you to that person and them to you, but there have been plenty of urban, upscale, beautiful and kindly couples that don't survive matrimony and plenty of strange, “how did those two get together“ couples that have lasted longer than Star Trek has been in reruns.

A good marriage has an unquantifiable element, and community is the same - I can draw lines around it with words (“buzz“ “membership acquisition“ “customer touch“ “tipping point“) but I can never really pinpoint that moment where someone simply decides to be kind, put themselves out there, and answer a question in a newsgroup. The point where someone looks around the Web site, decides that they like it, and uploads a user sample to Gotdotnet. The moment where, frustrated that there isn't enough out there for developers of their ilk, stand up and create a user group of their own. Yes, this blog post is heading into Betsy's “community woo woo” zone, but it's those moments that make the cleanup and the deleting worthwhile. I clean out the unworthy, so that the worthy may enter. :-)

Actually, I also live for the times when Gotdotnet users tell me to get in there and just smite them, but that's just my overheated crankiness today. Pray for rain.....:D

----------------------Randomness ----------------------------------

From my officemate: Remember all those great products Wile E. Coyote sent away for from Acme...

And I have to say, I loved this little anecdote of Raymond Chen's about the 20-foot-long computer.

Are you using One Note and MindManager together with Get It Done Methodology? Call for input.....

https://www.davidco.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1139&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0