We've received one comment so far (that wasn't spam); though our traffic numbers were very high. [Update: Spam comments: 167. Real comments: 1 --ed.] Even our Slashdotted articles had commentary on Slashdot's site, not on our own; and I am not sure why that is. I also think that in the coming year we need to add more of a human touch to the blog - to be sure, we believe the material we write is compelling and of high quality - but I'm worried that you, the audience, might perceive it as too corporate. (Sadly - for the first couple of weeks, we were too corporate. We got some bad advice.)

Now we've moved onto a model which I think provides the best of professionally edited content with the extemporaneous model of blog posting. Most of our articles are either directly written by our authors or come as the result of interviews I do with them with a tape recorder running. I ask them to share their expertise on a topic, transcribe the interview, and then we work together to edit the finished article.

We also have an open-blog policy - where any employee can submit comment for the blog or request an interview. And that enables us to get a wide variety of voices and viewpoints on the blog.

We do hope to get more posts directly from our CEO and CTO in the coming weeks, although it's been a busy time for all of us.

I'd like to directly ask you what you'd like to read, but without comments, that information isn't very forthcoming. In the meantime, I'm just going to try different things and find out, through trial and error, what works. One of the experiments is going to be talking more about our personal lives, like Cathy's stories about why SuperAgent is called SuperAgent when it isn't actually an agent.

We also lose a lot of repeat readership over the weekend - our subscriptions dip when we're not publishing. To counter this, we've started batting around ideas regarding "viral videos" we could run on the weekend and such, but I'm not sure we should do this until we make sure that the videos match the quality of our other content, or you guys (the readers) actively request it. As funny as the homage to the Colbert Report (which we internally codenamed "Boykolbert" before deciding that the idea needed refining) would have been, I'm not sure it would have been as informative and well done as the homage to The Office that helped promote another Austin company, Uship.com (which inspired the "Boykolbert" project.) I'd like to hold off on producing any "viral videos" until we make sure that there's more behind it than a flashy gimmick - if we do "Boykolbert" or any other send-up, we have to make sure that there's a good reason behind it to better serve our readers, and that it's of the same quality of all our other posts - not just a cheap traffic-grabbing stunt.

That said, I firmly think that we should start looking into video for other purposes as well. We're hoping to have some videos showing you the new improvements of ReporterAnalyzer 7.3 and NPC 3.0. The only reason we're not doing so now is because it's the end of the year, and half the office is on vacation and the other half is desperately finishing up projects - no one seems to have time to sit down and do a video presentation.

We're going to resume daily posting on January 3, 2006; next Wednesday. We're hoping that you'll keep reading when the new year rolls around.

Brian Boyko is Editor of Network Performance Daily and New Media Communications Specialist at NetQoS.

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