Many organisations have realised the value of blogging from a corporate marketing perspective but I’ve recently gained first hand experience of blogging as a social networking tool.  In general, any relationships formed as a result of blogging activities are online (whilst other tools such as LinkedIn attempt to convert personal relationships into more complex social networks) but I keep bumping into people that actually read the stuff that I write here!

Earlier this month, over lunch at the UK highlights from the Microsoft Management Summit event, I realised that the chap sitting next to me had left a comment on this blog a few weeks back and we got talking (Hi Dan); then, tonight I was back at Microsoft for a TechNet event about Windows PowerShell, where another chap introduced himself and said that he reads my blog (Hi Mike).  It’s happened before too – I work for a very large organisation and a couple of colleagues have commented that they knew me from my blog before they met me.

Now, just to keep my ego in check, I should remember that this blog’s readership is not enormous (although it has grown steadily since I started tracking the metrics) but bearing in mind that must of what I write is just my notes for later re-use, it’s really good when someone says “hello” and lets me know that they’ve found something I wrote to be useful.

Earlier this week, I added a contact form to the site and I still allow comments on posts (even if 95% of the comments are spam, I get some good feedback too).  So, feel free to get in touch if you like what you see here.  I can’t promise to write on a particular subject as that’s not the way this blog works (I write about my technology experiences and they, by their very nature, are unplanned) but it’s good to know that sitting here in my hotel room writing something late at night is not a complete waste of time.

Moving back to the social engineering point for a moment; it’s worth pointing out that the blogroll on this site is (XFN is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks).