Return of the Ninja and his darn A.D.D.

Recently, I’ve been thinking long and hard about blogging. People get on my case because “the ninja hasn’t blogged lately”. They’re right. I do understand that when you have go so far as to actually establish some sort of audience–in my case–Splunk related content consumers, you owe it to them to keep the content up. In fact I do cherish the one thing any reader does give (which is the best possible gift)–your attention. You have my word I shall publish much more.

What I’d ultimately like to do is use something like Twitter to create microblog feeds that pipe directly in to WordPress, and are delivered to the blog as posts, or whatever. Technically Twitter competes–in a small way–with WordPress, but who cares. What I need is a content publishing platform that will handle the *hopefully* well thought out blog posts, and immediate “thought spitting”, as i call it. I like Twitter because I can spit out what I’m thinking right now and with its forced brevity of 140 characters per post, i’m more likely to finish. On top of that, Twitter is near-real-time publishing with zero steps other than “speak, you geek!”

Example “thought spit”: Here’s a way cool search for dhcp “dhcpd via | transaction fields=mac_address maxspan=5”

That single thought has value, in the same way that if i was watching over your shoulder when you were using Splunk and told you to run that command. You would see the results and value quite quickly–in the above case, the assembly of an entire DHCP transaction from a single search command.

While I don’t think I really have A.D.D., it is a metaphor on how my brain handles all of the text info coming in from email, calendar, SMS, Splunk, customers, users, and every other input–including Twitterer’s I personally follow. I am trying to figure out the right balance of how to:

1. Educate people about Splunk
2. Teach them cool stuff
3. Enable them to do both #1 and #2
4. Foster more new users and customers of Splunk, which hopefully is a result of #1 + #2 + #3

I’ve been working on a cool video on how to use Amazon’s EC2 service with Splunk. Look forward to that, but in the mean time, watch my Splunk employee profile video–and follow me on Twitter if you want (details at end of video). I’m nuts, you have been warned.

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Thanks!
Michael Wilde