Reading and Blogging in 2009

IMHO the year 2009 will be the year when the best-organized IT managers/professionals get themselves in the habit of well-managing their blog-reading and knowledge retention. The IT professionals in 2009 who are going to be leading the efforts in the industry to apply technology to real-world business needs are going to be doing plenty of reading in order to stay current, solve problems and come up with the best solutions for their organizations. Typically this will be done through an "in-the-cloud" RSS reader that's also installed on their mobile phone and allows them to analyze statistics and prioritize their RSS feeds to be more productive. They'll spend at least 10 hours/week reading blogs. It'll happen on the train, in restaurants or anywhere they're "waiting" on their mobile phones. It'll happen while they are using their computers at work or home. They will typically be following hundreds of blogs and add at least a dozen or more additional ones every month to their subscriptions. Next they'll track the statistics on their subscriptions and organize them according to which ones are most useful in their jobs/work and then focus on getting updates from the blogs that are the highest priority. In a typical week they'll glance at thousands of titles and then pick a few hundred of the titles to click on to see the opening sentence in the posting. Of these a couple dozen will actually be read and most of the rest just skimmed. With all the constant change in technology there is no more effective way to stay current on technology in 2009 than through fast-speed-blog-reading.

If you want to be heard then you need to earn trust and be rated high on their watch list. You can accomplish this by doing the following:

(1) Regularly update your blog with current useful content.
(2) Generally make each entry short and easy to read.
(3) Provide all possible links and references to avoid plagiarism.
(4) Its imperative that you sincerely try to be completely unbiased and objective.
(5) Warn your readers if you are going to write lengthy details for your own knowledge retention purposes.