BetterECM - russ stalters’ Blog on Exploring NextGen ECM

Back in August I wrote about the photo safari my wife and I took in South Africa. Well it took some time to work through almost 1,000 pictures I shot and process them. I really enjoy photography and this trip and experience reminded me how much I have missed exploring the world through a lens. Anyway I wanted to share some of the pictures. The sunsets were spectacular!

If you want to view a small subset of the pictures I took I uploaded some of them to Zooomr and you can click here.

Had a little fun with this one.

I have to apologize to the readers of BetterECM for my lack of posts over the last several weeks. I just returned from a two week vacation out of the country. I had a wonderful time in South Africa on safari. It was really quite incredible. My friend in the picture just wants to say hello to all the BetterECM readers out there

Also some big personal changes are about to occur which I will announce shortly. Preparing for these changes has consumed a good deal of my time and energy over the last several months.

Anyway, I am back, reinvigorated, and ready to  pick up where I left off with part 2 of “Effectively Managing Information Becomes Strategic: An Approach” later today.

Thanks to all my subscribers and readers for hanging in there.

Well, BetterECM is one year old today. I almost forgot but was reminded when meeting with some of my readers at the Annual AIIM Awards Dinner. Wow, one year old, time flies.

It is fitting that on the one year anniversary of BetterECM, that I be attending AIIM in Boston. Because of AIIM 2006, one of my former colleagues and good friends, Trudy McCrea, shamed me into starting BetterECM. There is not a day that I do not thank here for her persistent prodding and encouragement to start this Blog. She thought that some of our clients would find my posts and observations about the AIIMexpo conference last year useful and enlightening.

Well, I have to tell ya…I think I have gotten more out of writing BetterECM then my readers have. I have really received some fantastic comments and suggestions. The process of observing the market, reading some really great ECM blogs and thinking about what all this means when it come to making ECM better has really helped me learn so much more about this market and the challenges everyone face.

Well, here are the statistics as of today, one year later:

Total Views: 44,675

Best Day Ever: 459

Posts: 134

Comments: 176

Spam

Akismet has protected your BetterECM site from 10,636 spam comments.

I have 258 regular Feedburner subscribers now.

Finally, I want to thank all of you for being my sounding board, my confidants (not really…there is no privacy here), and my teachers. This has been a most amazing learning experience. I just wish I had started writing my Blog a few years earlier.

Thanks all,

I started BetterECM because a friend kept bugging me and hounding me last year. And the day I launched BetterECM I had only one reader, me. Then something really cool started happening. People started reading BetterECM and they liked it. The number of readers continued to grow steadily and then one day it happened.

All of a sudden I started getting strange comments. Spam! So, you know things are a bit strange when you can measure the success of a blog by the volume of comment spam you are getting.

And now, with nine days until the first birthday of BetterECM, the number of spam comments has gone over that magical metric of 10,000! As a matter of fact, as I write this the number of spam comments is up to 10,012.

What is really strange is that thankfully nobody ever gets to see them since Askimet which is provided by WordPress.com catches 98% of the spam and I get notified when a comment is posted. I delete any spam comments that slip through ASAP.

So, my question is, why do they do it?

Oh, yeah. Thanks Trudy, for pushing me to start BetterECM! I have really enjoyed the experience and learned a great deal from my readers and other colleagues that I now read on a regular basis.

Hat tip to George Dearing for organizing the “The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Network” thorugh Feedburner. This Network is a compliation of a group of great ECM Blogs including BetterECM.

George is providing a great service with this. Readers of the network can search through the network of articles, subscribe via email to a Daily Network Digest and subscribe to the indivual RSS feeds of the members of the network.

Nice job, George!