Sean Walther’s Blog

Jonathan Schwartz: Ex Sun CEO Blogs about “What I Couldn’t Say…”

In a position of leadership Jonathan Schwartz, the ex CEO of Sun Microsystems, couldn’t say what he wanted.  Now that he is an “ex”, he is telling some great “war stories”.

Anyone thinking of working in tech, working in tech… developers, managers, CTOs, CEOs … should read this blog.

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Tags: Apple, Bill Gates, Blog, Jonathan Schwartz, Linked List, Microsoft, Steve Jobs, Sun Microsystems, What I Couldn't Say

Do readers like tag clouds on blog sites?

Tags: Blog, Poll, readers, tag cloud

Twitter Traffic Experiment

We’re doing an experiment right now.  I’ve been wanting to get into Twitter to see how it is.  Something I hve been investigating over the last few months is the impact of various methods in building traffic and exposure on the web (the two are tightly intertwined… sometimes unfortunately).

I have a few friends on Twitter who have been trying to get me on there.  So I caved.  I setup a Twitter account (seangw for those of you out there).  

First of all, please comment me if I’m using terminology incorrectly.  Some words I just discovered today:

• Retweet
• Tweets
• Tweeting 

So far I have managed to let my friends, who have been “tweeting” me for the past 8 months, know that I am finally there to receive the messages (some date back to July 2008).  

I have also managed to find Twellow.com — which tries to act like a Yellow Pages for Twitter.  It lets you find people who are interested in the same thing as you, and follow them on Twitter.  Right now I think I have followed 45 people (I had 3 people I had been following since the account was first created).  I’ve actually seen some interesting things in the last 6 hours already.  

Information I’ve found interesting just over the course of this one evening has been:

• Feedback on the MacWorld event
• links to a new iPhone OS (I may follow up on this, I’m not sure how reliable the link is)

Not a bad total for the first evening of watching Twitter on my iPhone while watching TV.

The real part of the experiment is how much traffic does Twitter actually drive to a blog/website?

Obviously, I intend to make my presence on Twitter permanent.  In this unique time I have recording mechanisms set up to allow an analysis of the “Twitter” effect.  I will be paying attention to the growth of my followers, along with the traffic I see from Twitter.  

Earlier today I had read a blog posting that said over 90% of his traffic now comes from Twitter.  I think that was mostly bullshit, as he was selling applications to build up Twitter traffic.  He did have a vested interest in peddling the case.

So — if you’re from Twitter, please follow me and spread the word (I will follow everyone who follows me, after all, you must have good taste).  If not, check it out — it’s not that scary.

So far I’ve been averaging about 50 visits a day on this blog prior to Twitter.  I have been adding a lot of content now that the holidays are over, and traffic on other sites is going up in general, but we should be able to see the effects of Twitter (with a very small grain of salt).

Any and all feedback is more than welcome!

Tags: Blog, Traffic, twellow, Twitter

OpenDNS – Free powerful DNS service

You may have noticed the Entrecard advertisement on the side of this blog, it’s a site that links bloggers together.  

Entrecard helps you get the word out about your blog, and hopefully find more people that you want to follow, as well as readers for your own blog.  

One of the habits Entrecard creates is looking through a lot of blogs in the beginning of the day.  You can see a list of blogs that are members of Entrecard and have looked at your site.  It’s nice to see a list of people who are interested in your subject matter.  Unfortunately, that list of blogs can reach into the hundreds on a daily basis.

I found myself queuing up about 40-50 tabs in Chrome (still using and loving it) and looking through everyones blogs.  

This brings me to OpenDNS.  

Before using OpenDNS servers, I would normally be able to only load up a page or two before pages started to fail.  I know I have a fast computer, and that the links were valid, the hosts were not going down, it was merely a problem with my internet connection.  Seeing as the problem was mostly binary — either pages loaded or had DNS issues, I figured the problem was DNS related.

OpenDNS has a great tutorial on how to setup OpenDNS on your network. 

It was quick, easy, and drastically improved some browsing experiences (normal browsing is a bit faster, but not as noticable as when I load dozens of pages at a time).

One bonus is that you have a dashboard that can be used to control your networks usage.  You can easily filter sites, monitor usage, and create shortcuts for any machine in your network (home points to www.google.com, mail could point to mail.google.com/a/domain.com, etc).

Below are some recent articles about OpenDNS:

• Lose your Time Warner internet connection (again)? You could try Open DNS
• 20,000 K-12 Schools Adopt Free Web Security Tool
• OpenDNS – a blogger writes about DNS security issues, and why OpenDNS helps 

Tags: Blog, browsing, Chrome, DNS, entrecard, internet connection, OpenDNS, security

Feedburner, WordPress and Blogs

Running and maintaining a blog is a learning experience for me.

First thing I’m learning, there is no instant gratification.

Second, fortunately, there are tons of tools out there to help you.

I’ve just stumbled across a post at TD Creative, with regards to Feedburner.  It highlights some things that feedburner will do for you.

Highly recommended read, I’m looking into it at the moment.

Tags: Blog, Feedburner, WordPress