I’ve given a lot of advice to bloggers, potential bloggers, various users of social media and aspirational influencers. No throat clearing. Just start. This is the same advice given to writers: start right in the middle of the action. I’ve noticed over the years that people have a dialog in their head about why they […]
Author Archives: John Mark Troyer
Cloud vSphere Labs for fun and profit
Some material from my keynote at the Silicon Valley VMUG User Conference on April 14, 2015: You, as a technologist, have unprecedented power at the moment. The book at the right is The New Kingmakers by Stephen Grady. It’s not long. You should read it. Even if you’re not a developer per se, you should read […]
A TechReckoning update for September
All my good stuff is now going on over at TechReckoning. Check it out. (I will be at SpiceWorld in Austin, TX Sept 23-24 and VMworld Europe in Barcelona Oct 14-16. Please say hi if you’re there!) 1. Subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter.[This has since moved from Tinyletter to here.] This is where most of […]
The operational story companies don’t realize they are telling
With the rise of social media, a company tells many more stories than we traditionally recognize. The Company Story is the official one, and the Product Story has now grown larger with social media, but have companies considered the story they are telling through their operations, the one that actually shows who they are? That’s […]
Webinars as a digital marketing platform
My colleague Karri was telling me about some research on webinars she had seen recently. The takeaway was that, shockingly, people didn’t like to sit through an hour of a video webinar* to get the five minutes of information they had been promised. Karri then shared her idea that maybe people (including us) should be putting […]
Don’t predict; create the 2014 you want to see
I don’t like year-end predictions, but we get so many of them in tech and IT. They’re slightly entertaining, but, like Christmas cookies, they’re empty calories. If you eat too many, you probably regret it. What if instead of predicting the way that others are going to change the world next year, we instead envision […]
Three IT podcasts and blogs that need to exist
Here are three IT-oriented podcasts and/or blogs that I think need to exist. I don’t really have the time or obsession to start these, but I think there’s an audience for all of them. Your version may not quite look like mine, but if you’ve been thinking in any of these directions, I encourage you […]
The recent rains have brought out the lilies in the yard. Winter in California!
The Consumerization of IT Evals
There is a huge amount of emotion currently surging around software evaluation subscription programs for IT like TechNet and VMTN. IT pros are self-organizing to send a message to Microsoft to not cancel the $349 TechNet Subscription and to VMware to bring back VMTN Subscription, cancelled in 2007 but still reported to have a “very high” […]
Geek Whisperers in Action
See more Geek Whisperers – our podcast about social media and community in enterprise IT — over at http://geek-whisperers.com. Somehow I’m not surprised I got caught talking. The laptop is Brender’s — mine has more stickers and more dents. Taken on Aug 28, 2013 at VMworld in San Francisco by Sean Thulin. via Facebook https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152142071463496&set=a.10150610782453496.474895.745783495&type=1