The Transcender Team Weblog

This Space For Input: What do YOU want to see?

When I was a kid I had a book of puzzles that were hidden drawings-within-a-drawing – “There are twelve cats in this picture of a library; can you spot them all?” – which would keep me riveted until I found all the hidden whatevers. And after I solved a puzzle, I couldn’t see it the same way again; the formerly hidden objects were now so obvious that I wondered how I’d missed them at all. In fact, I could see nothing but the hidden objects.

We rolled out the Transcender blog late last summer. And now I see corporate-based blogs everywhere I look.  My gardening catalog has a blog; they share seed-sprouting tips. My knitting supply catalog has a blog; they did a tour of their woolens factory. My favorite authors have blogs – well, that’s been true for a while – but their publishers have blogs now, too, discussing supply-chain issues. [Blogs, as a concept, are so thoroughly mainstream that director Joss Whedon turned what could have been an obscure geek-culture trend, the online journal, into the successful (and very, very funny) movie-ette, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.]

Now – in my humble opinion - some of these corporate blogs are more interesting, and relevant, than others. I’ve seen a few that were clearly put forth by marketing whizzes crowing, “This is how you reach the youthful consumer of today!”, without really knowing what the blog should *say.* Some, on the other hand, are dead useful. (I love my gardening company’s blog.) I’ve seen people get pretty immediate customer service just by dropping a comment on a blog page about a problem with a product. Some are strikingly personal, even while they’re being informative. For example, nothing humanizes the Faceless Machine of Microsoft Certification (tm!) to me more than learning that a Born to Learn team member is knocking back a cold one in my favorite local haunt, ten miles to the south.

IT-industry blogs are among the most useful and relevant of the breed, because we in IT are used to finding information online, on bulletin boards, posted to alt.newsgroups, or otherwise spun across the e-void.

In short, I think the corporate-blogsplosion is fantastic. And the great thing** about the new “corporate blog” concept is the flexibility. How dry and informative is it going to be? Are you writing it like an opt-in newsletter, or are you setting it up as a question-and-answer forum for customers? How much are we going to talk about our kids, make jokes, post photos, horse around? Do we rotate through our knowledge base and post about a different certification or technology each time, or do we focus on the ones that get the most customer feedback?

So I’ll (finally) meander to the point of this entry. What do YOU, the certification-seeking reader, want to see in this blog? What would be the most useful, interesting, informative? You know – things like:

• Industry news (related to certifications)
• Industry news (NOT related to certifications)
• Test technologies
• Specific technical questions
• General technical information

Comment away. As long as this post is visible here, we want to know what you think.

** And the occasional source of knee-knocking, stomach-dropping, plunge-into-the-unknown, trailing-hyphens-behind-you terror. From an administrator’s standpoint, at least. No one expects an inquisition, or a paradigm shift.

-Bm Ann