@Yancy - yeah I just went with what showed on the top hits list and then their top postings. They did not go all the way back?

Chris, the data you used could be way off. Check out this "change log" update I posted last month... { Link }

I haven't blogged as much this year (busy, busy, busy), but my number one was "My new favorite Lotus Notes Zen error message" at { Link }

I guess that says something about what interests people... maybe.

"Mac OS X 10.6.2 now available - fixes Notes 8.5.x icon issue" { Link }

Clearly, 8.5.1 (and associated issues/enhancements) was one of the biggest topics of the year...

@Bonj - did you find any interest in Google buying the blogging company? Do you think that there are enough Domino bloggers or there should be more since the templates are freely available as well as the sites to host them?

Per the statistics it would stand to reason (and it appears to me) that the number of applications for aggregating and reading blogs has grown quicker than the number of applications for blogging. Would an increase in blogging software raise the percentage of those that blog. As Microsoft has jumped into the frey beta testing their MSN Spaces blogging environment, I would imagine following it and seeing if it makes it out of beta or falls victim as other anticipated MS releases have may be an indication of what lies ahead for the number that actually blog.

I would agree that all of the hype with political blogs did introduce a lot of people to the blogging world. I can also believe that the actual number of bloggers did not grow as quickly. As some have gotten use to reading blogs and getting around through them during the political season, I could see more of them taking a stab at it. As there is a lot of rehash I can also see some that may simply spend their time reading items of interest to them and spending their time commenting on the topics on the blogs they read rather than actually creating their own blog.

I am male, I have the high speed connection at home, I have been online for at least six years, I just wish someone would have told me before that I am affluent, well-educated and young.

I do find enough information of interest and enough of value on Domino and other blogs that I keep reading them. It can be a bit time consuming though, but I would say that I have traded some of the time that I spent reading print articles for reading blogs. Many posts are directly the result of someone having read something in some article anyway and having it posted on a blog allows one to give their own perspective and opens it up for interaction and discussion that you don't have with the physical printed media.

No I do not use RSS exclusively, but I would say that I do a very large percentage of my blog reading via RSS/Atom feeds.

Feaddemon does it for me...

I see that if there is now a session on Domino blogs at Lotusphere (or BOF) then you are correct that the interest wil peak more. Many will spring up and many will die.

As some of us do restate tech info we find, I know I usually do so after needing it for some bizarre customer issue that I come across. Or worse yet for a technote that our issue helped write.

I do most of my reading by RSS but still havent quite decided on the best reader for it yet in my eyes. I love the plugin for Trillian, I have tried Madicon and forget to go back to it (I need to redo it actually) and even looked at some other readers just playing around.

I agree on a major benifit of the blogs is that there is a refreshed feeling of "community" in the Notes arena. It has already proved very useful over the past year. Quoting roadmaps has become quite a familiar topic of mine with customers, and the community has become much louder instead of just taking the hits from M$. As for the content, many sites are still technical, often just mentioning information that already exists (eg forums) but still useful. I suppose it will be just focusing our limited on the blogs that interest us, as there are bound to be many, many more springing up in the months to come.

I get value from the blogs I read, but it's mostly "soft" value - political stuff, especially.

For instance, the last six months has seen the political massacre of Microsoft by the Domino/Notes blogging community, ripping apart just about everything that they've put out in the groupware/messaging strategy & publicity.

Which will be useful if anyone dares broach the "I like Outlook, let's switch to Exchange Server" issue.

But blogs seem pretty poor at passing on technical information in the most. You pick up some technical stuff in all that political mess, but the social nature of blogs makes them fill up with social stuff - commentary and opinion on what people are seeing.

A classic example of this is NotesTips ({ Link } - I worked with Mike, and recall seeing early versions. They were strong on tips and articles, and weak on social stuff. But over time, NotesTips became NotesBlog - it had more rants, more opinion, and less technical content. (Or so it seemed.)

However, this isn't a bad thing. As a former CompuServe dweller, I fondly remember the LotusC forum. There was a sense of community there. For a while, that was missing. People that were passionate about Domino/Notes were beginning to be less visible. There was a feeling of isolation that was bad for anyone working with Domino/Notes. Blogs have changed that - I think that there are probably either more "champions" for Domino/Notes out there now, some of whom will eventually also stick their heads above the parapet and start sniping... ;-)

The rise of the blogs has been amazing, and for the most part, they are a great source of data. Not only technical data either. I have found the blogs more useful in finding out relevant competitive information. Some blogs I used to read, have now evolved in their focus, from technical to political for example. With the number of blogs rising by the hour, RSS is the only way to read all of them. I would say I read the blogs by RSS about 80% of the time, and then browse to a few (if I have time).

plugin sametime

I must be the only one who doesn't mind the IBM filenames. Perhaps I'm just too organised?

Before downloading R7, for example, I created a folder in my installs network share. This would be:

\\server\installs\Lotus\ND7

In this folder I then created

\\server\installs\Lotus\ND7.0\Notes

\\server\installs\Lotus\ND7.0\Domino

And then the language variants:

\\server\installs\Lotus\ND7.0\Notes\English

\\server\installs\Lotus\ND7.0\Notes\French

\\server\installs\Lotus\ND7.0\Notes\Polish

etc.

I then download the files to these specific folders and do an 'extract to here' in winzip when complete.

My installation documentation tell our first line team to install \\server\installs\Lotus\Current\Language\setup.exe

The 'Current' folder is a shortcut to the current internal version number in use, currently 6.5.4. They all have the same folder structure and I never can forget which download is which.

Like I said, I'm too organised.

I can't agree more. I used to be able to find what I wanted on that site at least more easily than I could on the IBM site as a whole. Now it's RIDICULOUS. What the hell good is performance if you're not finding what you came to get? "Here's a whole heap of trash. Wasn't that fast!?"

thanks?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!

It is somewhat comforting to know that I am not the only one that finds this "new" interface challenging. You have no idea where to start looking, once the results are brought back.

The new one sucks even worse than the last one.

At least you could search on 6.5.3 and get all language and platform versions, then it was just a matter of paging through them.

In the new one that doesn't seem to work anymore, I.e the result seem to be missing some languages for example.

The PartnerWorld for Software site that you're referring to, before it became part of the overall PartnerWorld site, was on Domino - the SW downloads catalog itself was not. If you're familiar with the old site you should notice a difference in performance now with the new site, although nobody will disagree that the search is still not improved too much. They are working to improve the tagging for search, but there's a huge amount of data from old downloads that need to be updated. It will continue to improve in the future!

Looking up the Domino stuff is bad enough, but try some of the other stuff like DB2 or Tivoli. It's almost worth the time looking up the part number and then doing it. You can almost google it faster to find the part number than wade through all the results the searches bring back.

I was just complaining about the support database yesterday! I haven't been able to find anything since they "improved" the Knowledgebase.

It's not really clear from the tone of your entry. LOL.

I totally agree with your impressions. Everytime IBM improves something that used to be on a Domino backend, it always works worse and I can never find my way around in it. The prime example is the Support DB, which used to be easy and now brings back totally random crap.

Sean---

ok, one mark for the ok column but not good for DWA

I tested it, but since we have a good DWA base here I have all users on the DWA template, so it wasn't feasible to use it in production. And, I didn't have the time to try figuring out everything they were doing with it. I did test it out and it worked at the time. This was back when they first released the template for production.

Thanks Chris.

Yes, IBM is officially supporting the #LS10 hashtag as well. In fact, I encouraged it during the 'community voting' process from IBM perspective.

#LotusKnows tag is used for campaign needs, for catchy (or corny) taglines. ;)

However, the account @LotusKnows is our official account from support and IBM coverage perspective. I personally recommend following the #LS10 tag for Lotusphere coverage needs.

We will also be providing support and coverage via the @LotusKnows account (twitter.com/lotusknows). Feel free to follow the accounts.

@BilalJaffery

Bilal Jaffery