A little bit of history
by Volker Weber
There is a small kettle boiling about the removal of this site from PlanetLotus. Time to look back why it was there anyway. About ten years ago my server was the training wheels for edbrill.com. Way back before any of this Lotus blogging started to become fashionable, edbrill.com was just a DNS entry for edbrill.vowe.org. And traffic was very low:
The original design was a stock MovableType template. Ed was interested in having his presence running on top of Domino, so within a couple of months, that design was recreated on top of a bespoke Notes application. Way before there were any blogging templates for Domino. We moved the content over and edbrill.com took flight on Domino.
Anyway, I was interested in Lotus then, and I still am. My topics have expanded into lots of other areas, chief among them mobile devices which capture a lot of imagination today. And yes, my colleagues make fun of me for still keeping an eye on Notes & Domino. But that's OK.
Comments
Volker, if I may ask, why are you interested in Lotus. Just wondering what the history is.
Notes was the interesting piece of software as IBM was about to sink OS/2. Now Connections looks rather interesting.
Lotus has been a major player in the messaging and collaboration business for years, and even though Notes has been declining in market share (that's not a dig, it's a fact) it still has a percentage of an enormous market... and that means it has a place in the market. Putting loyalties and paymasters aside, IBM are innovating with Notes and Connections... and that makes them interesting.
PlanetLotus appears to be some sort of self referential circle-jerk for inbreds who are still dining out on tech that belongs in the 1990s. I doubt its readership extends much beyond the bloggers whose content it aggregates. Better not to be associated with it.
Even if that is true, I don't mind being listed there. I just don't give them the full articles so my content does not get punished for being on a content farm.
Jeff, I don't think that's true. My highest referral from PlanetLotus came when I announced I was leaving IBM, and I got around unique 400 link-throughs from PlanetLotus. There aren't 400 bloggers on there.
And the latter versions of Notes, and now Connections, are very much software of the current time.
Just let the Kettle boil Volker, those of us who like your blog will still continue to read it. After all...there is a huge world besides notes :)
@Darren
By the time of your departure PlanetLotus listed around 360 blogs. With your mentioned 400 unique link-throughs Jeff isn't that far away from the truth.
PlanetLotus will need a new plan anyway. The brand is gone, most frequent bloggers are gone or too busy. Customers are moving away from Notes and Domino. Connections is growing but it will be interesting if IBM will be able to scale this to the same extend it did with Notes and Domino.
The inclusion (or the opposite) of this site on PlanetLotus won't change much but with collaborationtoday.info there already is a sanitized place for IBM diehards.
That is a propaganda site. No need to waste any time there.
In reference to the last sentence of the original post:
Thank you for still keeping an eye on Notes and Domino. And Lotus - or now ICS.
Thank you for all the support and criticism in all that years. Even if sometimes hard to admit, it helped Lotus and IBM.
And for sure you don't do things for no reason. Your colleges will learn that over time :-)
Thanks, Ralph. Don't worry, I will stay my course. ;-)
For me "keeping an eye on Notes & Domino" is the main reason to continue reading this "n'est pas un blog" - although I have to admit that I already have learned a lot about other IT topics reading it.
Lotus Notes/Domino is alive and provides much more business value than most of those fancy new web frameworks, that appear and disappear within months. There are still millions of users and thousands of developers out there - most of them doing their daily work without blogging about it. That's because the technology just works and does not need huge development budgets nor major release change activities every two years. If it's used as intended it can solve problems within days - instead of spending months implementing complex solutions. So as long as there is a business case there is a business.
