Commercial Open Source Blog: one year in review

Today I took my time to zoom back over my last year blogging over open source. Commercial Open Source blog has just completed its first year of life.

In November 2006 I scrambled with the generous help of Antonella Beccaria and little advice of my new media mentor Robin Good to create the blog site you are just reading now.

A year in reviewA year in review by _mpd_

I was happy. I was excited. I could not hold myself in place. I felt that the time to share my ideas, some of my experiences, a bit of my know-how had definitely come.

I see the web as a venue for sharing, exchanging and making valuable conversations, and I thought that I had to make myself fully part of this.

One idea that significantly influenced my decision to take on blogging was the Open Source Franchising business model. As a matter of fact in the summer 2006 I had already written a paper describing such business model, which I had also submitted to Sun Microsystems. My desire, especially since Sun didn’t ever comment back on my proposal, was then to extend my quest for feedback and opinions from other authoritative open source thought leaders.

Matt Asay positively commented my idea, and many others followed, opening the conversation. It was my very first success as blogger, and it showed me the importance and effectiveness of using a blog to create an online dialog. The conversation went on for several months, until Simon Phipps – Chief Open Source Officer at Sun – fully embraced my idea to the point of taking up the flag himself.

Thanks to this and probably to some of my other writings, some initial gigs came through:

And that’s how I discovered how blogging could be helpful to get invited in meetings, events and conferences, eventually opening me doors and new opportunities. As I go forward in my blogging experience I am realizing that my use of writing to get greater exposure and visibility may very well be my very best marketing strategy.

Like it or not, I had also my share of ego-boosting. Initially mostly for psychologically reward, later on as an increasingly valuable meter of my own professional credibility, I have had spent my share of time checking up technorati and looking at google ranks, just as everyone else. And I learned a few things:

  1. you can get to know lots of like-minded people who share your interests, passions and sometimes business customers and reach out to them in ways that would be next to impossible in the physical world:
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  2. among my key referrals opensource.org and openoffice.it/org have played a significant role in sending me huge number of visitors, that made me realize how important is to keep contributing whenever possible to such large and important communities;
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  3. Robin Good was totally right suggesting me to pay great attention to choose the tag-line. Googling for Commercial Open Source my blog is always one of the very first results. In reason of that PR agencies and CEOs from all around the world touch base with me daily to open more and more conversations.
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  4. I learned to stay focused and to not get distracted by off topic arguments, as soon as I did I was rightly “ripreso” for that.

Last but not least, I wish to share some authors and bloggers I found inspirational:

I learned a lot from them, and with some I am enjoying regular conversations. After all the ultimate reason to keep writing daily for all of us is that it is really true that no man is an island, not even a blogger!

Technorati Tags: open source blog, professional blogging, SavioRodrigues, DanaBlankenhorn, MatthewAslett, RossTurk, SourceForge Marketplace, JamesMcGovern, RedMonk

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