I have a long and complicated relationship with blogs. My first attempt was in 1997, hosted on my personal site at Yale. The term “blog” was a couple of years from being coined at that point, so the site was a set of essays in the style of Philip Greenspun, who had recently invented Internet-based exhibitionism (in a good way). This was all wonderful but lead to one major problem – I didn’t really have all that much to say. I was in college, and still working on my first startup. So I was learning a lot, but I hadn’t come to very many firm conclusions. When I graduated and that site slipped off the Internet and was not much missed.
Subsequent blogs included a personal blog (2001-2003), an O’Reilly Network blog (now apparently lost to the web as well, although it did feature a great review of various trade show tote-bags), and blog I started when I went to MIT for graduate school. The latter was essentially killed when I took a job working on healthcare IT policy for the US Government, and was told that I really couldn’t publish on any topic which was in the general remit of my job or my agency. At the time, that was almost everything I was likely to have a comment on.
The original incarnation of info.rmatics (this blog) was a group effort with some colleagues. That worked pretty well, but we never came up with a consistent voice or focus. Readers who were interested in hearing about JavaServerFaces didn’t want to wade through discussions of FTC disclosure rules for breaches of confidential patient data. The reverse also applied.
The strange thing is that in more than ten years of blogging I never really allowed myself to just sit down and write about what was interesting to me at the time. If my ruminations are useful for other people, that’s great – I hope they are. But I’m not going to worry about making every post interesting for every potential reader (although you can always subscribe by category).
Here’s the list. Off the top of my head, at 1:10 pm, Friday, December 30th, 2011, as I sit in a Starbucks in Southborough, Massachusetts, waiting for the nice people from 1-800-Got-Junk to call me to confirm that they’ll be coming to pick up a large pile of old furniture from my wife’s old house down the road. This is a unique moment in time, and I reserve the right to be distracted by other bright, shiny ideas at any point:
Business
- What’s fundable and what isn’t? What makes a start-up likely to succeed?
- Angel Investing. How can you create a strategy around small investments in very early stage companies?
- Sales and marketing. Simple products solving common problems are great. But what happens when you have a (moderately) complex product that solves a complex problem? How do you reach and educate your potential users.
- Measurement – how can you tell when a team is doing well? What metrics are most useful for companies at any given size?
- Customer Service – how can you create the best possible experience for your customers even if your resources are highly limited?
Healthcare
- How can we make the healthcare system more consumer-friendly?
- How can we take waste and repetition out of healthcare delivery?
- How can technology make life more fun and rewarding for physicians? Today’s electronic health records and related tools are a burden for clinicians – rare indeed is the doctor who will tell you that their tools make them a better physician.
- What’s the government up to?
Software
- What makes a software development team successful?
- How can groups of stakeholders – developers, users, designers, testers, managers and others – communicate their ideas cleanly and effectively? Previous experiments in this area helped spawn the Clickframes project.
- How do you hire and retain a talented software development team?
- What’s the best way to use Microsoft technologies to build a scalable web-based application?
- What’s up with HTML5 and JavaScript? The old patterns for building web applications are clearly obsolete. Books that I wrote six or seven years ago (and which provided great advice back then) are not merely out of date, they’re positively dangerous.
Everything Else
- Cameras. Cool technologies. Current affairs.
And so that’s the agenda for 2012 and beyond.
