You can’t fake Authenticity

By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily.
Last week, the cartoon strip Dilbert, penned by Scott Adams, did a series on corporate blogging, in which the pointy-haired antagonist tells the hapless technical writer that he wants to write a blog – then orders the tech writer to write it for him. To add insult to injury, he says that the blog doesn’t sound authentic enough and that in order to make it sound authentic, conversational and human, the technical writer should write the blog in the voice of Mark Twain.
Needless to say, the Dilbert fictional blog is a failure.
So I figured that it would be a good opportunity to explain a little bit about this corporate blog to the readership and explain to you how we do things, lest our image be confused with that of the Pointy Haired Boss and his Mark Twain blog.
First, Network Performance Daily is the corporate blog for NetQoS. Its most basic function is that of house organ. We talk about things we’re working on, give you info on key upcoming events, etc.
But the site is more than just a house organ. We have the opportunity to provide relevant, in-depth news as it happens, and while there are many business tech publications, no one is really focused in on network performance.
Network performance is, after all, a niche of enterprise computing, which is a niche of network computing, which is a niche of computing, which is a niche of technology.
But then again, this is the Blogosphere, famous for what Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, calls “the long tail.” If people out there weren’t aware of everything that went on with network performance, well, there’s no reason why we couldn’t share our expertise and insight with them. This blog gives us the opportunity to communicate with our customers and the public at large. It also gives us the opportunity to provide some level of education and, yes, evangelism, for the concept of network performance and measuring end-user quality of service, rather than worrying solely about uptime. Many people don’t understand how important network performance is to their organization. Most don’t know how to measure the performance of their networks in ways that are meaningful to their end users.
And of course, even we don’t have enough to say about network performance over the WAN every day, so we bring in topics of concern to the entire IT community and generally report on what’s interesting in the field of IT. Though we haven’t taken a position on Net Neutrality, we do know that whatever the end result of that debate turns out to be, it means a paradigm shift for network performance. We reported on Julie Amero because we believe that knowing what content is flowing over networks is the network engineer’s responsibility. Right now we’re talking to Adrian Hooke at NASA about Interplanetary Internet. It’s amazing what we’ve been able to accomplish and I’m very proud of it.
But getting back to the Dilbert comic that prompted this bout of navel-gazing…
First, anyone in our company can submit a blog post at any time. I do, in my capacity as editor, help them flesh it out and get it ready for publication by helping to take their first drafts – or transcribed interviews – and put them into a readable form. No offense, but we have some very smart, technical people who write in a stilted, mechanical style that often confuses, rather than enlightens. Other times, I interview people outside the company who have expertise in a particular area and write an article on that.
So there’s the full disclosure: I may edit for grammar and help people get their points across, but unlike Dilbert’s fictional blog, if you see a person’s picture or byline up on the post, they were the author. No one pretends to be someone else.
The blogosphere is a new medium – in fact, my job title at NetQoS is “new media specialist.” So we don’t always know the right course of action, don’t always have a battle plan, and many times we’re just playing it by ear. But we knew one thing from the first day: You can’t fake authenticity.