Friday February 18, 2005

Tips for bloggers I do it this way...

Jonathan wants Sun employees to blog. The title on the blogs.sun.com page says

"Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything."

It really is true. I do not get reminder or requests from anyone that I must write wonderful things about Sun, increase my technical content and not to write about random things that no one has any interest in. I think the interesting thing is to read what others write. I knew Chris was a keen cyclist but Trevor a runner ? If these people have these interests in a company of 30,000 employees that will mean there are lot more people out there wanting to read peoples thoughts on their own subjects of interest.

However for those that do not write weblogs and want to here is how I do it. I tend to do mine in advance and use the drafting feature of the tool we use. I usually just start with the subject in the title to remind me of the idea. As the week rolls on I add to each article and then decide when to publish it. This means I can easily write up articles when I have spare time at home or during lunch breaks at work.

Of course I find the whole experience very rewarding especially when I get comments or people talk to me about what I write.

It is good to train

I have just completed running a series of half hour mandatory courses on the lab relating to the health and safety, features of it, what you can and cannot do and where things are etc.

I am not someone who finds it easy to talk in public. But we knew that the engineers had to be trained on the above else an accident could occur or someone would do the wrong thing in the wrong place. I think if you do training on an ad hoc basis you can derive a lot of pleasure from it. I got a lot of positive feedback and for some engineers who had never talked to me before here was a chance to be introduced (we have recently enlarged the lab user base) . It has certainly started a dialog with many of them who now know who to talk to and that we are here to help.

I think when you do training you also learn things yourself. I had to be sure I knew safety information I gave was accurate as I am giving people information that will lead them to make a correct decision in the event of a incident.

At the end of each session I reminded them to ask if they do not understand, let us know when something is broken and tell us of things we could do that we do not do now.

The final challenge for us now is to give the salient points of this course to remote users the next stage of this training.