The time has come again, vote for your top blog / podcast etc! Just a heads up, I decided to have my blog removed from the list. I have been listed in the top 10 for the past 9 years and had the number 1 spot for the past 8 editions. I felt it was time for new blood to enter the top 10. It was time for a big change. Eric’s blog lists what he feels people should be basing their votes/ranking on. I sincerely hope though that people will look at the list in a different way this year. Last year I strongly felt that William deserved to win, but I suspect a lot of people voted for me for “longevity” reasons and what I produced in the years before.
I would like to ask people to look at the list in a different way this year and vote based on what people produced over the past 12 months. Who stood out the past 12 months, who produced those awesome deep dives, who had unique material and didn’t just copy the release notes, or produced just “next next finish” type blogs, or just copied/pasted the slides from blogger briefings. I know frequency is part of Eric’s list. Personally I rank a person with 10 high quality deep dives higher than someone with 100 ‘next next finish’ posts. (While the ‘next next finish’ posts may get more google clicks, it has hardly any value in my opinion.)
Let me list a couple of blogs that stood out to me for various reasons, I am not going to list the full top 12 I voted for, just 5 people I wanted to call out for various reasons:
- Cormac Hogan – Currently listed as number 3, high quality and high quantity, always love to read his insights / opinion on startups etc! Having worked with Cormac on papers / books, I know how fast he knocks out material, it is insane.
- William Lam – Currently listed as number 2, high quality and high quantity number of blogs, with really unique content. Is there anyone sharing more unique info than William these days? I don’t think so.
- Cody Hosterman – Currently listed as number 54. What stood out to me, Cody is not a VMware employee, but the level of depth and detail in his blogs are astonishing. Hence he got a place in my top 12!
- Myles Gray – One of the “newer” bloggers. Some great networking blogs on there with content I have not seen anywhere else, it is time for some new folks to bubble up!
- Luc Dekens – He has been around for ages. Hasn’t really received the respect, from a top bloggers point of view, he deserves. The undisputed king of PowerCLI and VMTN response time, and a great blogger.
Honourable mention: Brian Graf aka vTagion. His blog posts on HA/DRS last year around the release were awesome, but than again he was the PM for those products so I didn’t expect anything else.
Oh and before I forget, my fav podcast: Virtually Speaking with Pete Flecha and John Nicholson for sure. Only one I tune in to every week! Anyway, I hope you folks all go over the list in a similar way. Think about the past 12 months and which blogs helped you the most, which were unique, which stood out consistently. Think outside the box, don’t vote on someone simply because he was in the top 25 last year. Vote for them based on what they have produced the past 12 months!