My email chain with Jake Howlett of CodeStore

Little does he know, he changed my mind. I was going to email him today to let him know. I'll just let the site decide, it has an amazing way of doing that, not only from hits but from blog posts that people write.

Read from the bottom up. I'm posting the raw email so you can see how I tried to work with him. I give him options, I ask him if things sound fair, I state my concern (the readers), I even asked "What would you do if you were me?"

Bottom line, this was an unfinished conversations between two professional trying to work something out. I can't figure out why he brought it public when no action was taken or no decisive decision was made.

And yes, my analogy sucked, and my spelling as well.

UPDATE: Forgot this second to newest email: "BTW: The only reason it concerns me is that some of my readers might now rely on your site to find out I've posted. if you remove my site then I lose readers. It's not "fair" that you abuse that power."

Subject: Re: SharePoint
From: Rockall Design <mail@rockalldesign.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:47:19 +0100
To: Yancy Lent <yancylent@yahoo.com>

My last seven post have had between 100 and 300 hits on your site. I'd say that meant your visitors were interested in them (and two were about lotusscript anyway). People like the posts as they know they can read about Sharepoint from the POV of a Domino developer.

Do what you like though, I'm not really that bothered. I just think you're doing a dis-service to your visitors.

I talk about what I'm doing at the time. Right now it's Sharepoint. Next month it could be something amazing with Domino. Who knows...

If you do delist me I think you owe to the people who rely on your service to alert them to my new content to tell them that it's not me who's given up.

Jake

On 12/07/2010 20:03, Yancy Lent wrote:

Right, but they're not going to Planet Lotus to read your posts, they're
going there to read all posts about Lotus. It's not a site that
aggregates "people who dig Lotus" it aggregates people that post about
Lotus, something that you've, from the looks of it, have moved on from.

Plus, it's not like your posting about Java, you're posting about
SharePoint, it's like posting about Manchester United on a Liverpool or
Arsenal site.

So, given we both developers, can't you just create a private Lotus
categorized feed, so PL only aggregates your Lotus posts? Many have done
this, i do this. No one that reads PL cares about the cycling posts I've
put up lately, and if they wanted to learn more about SP, or cycling
they could just go other places to get it.

I don't see how the filtering of content to stay on topic is unfair.

Yancy

On 7/12/2010 2:14 PM, Rockall Design wrote:

BTW: The only reason it concerns me is that some of my readers might
now rely on your site to find out I've posted. if you remove my site
then I lose readers. It's not "fair" that you abuse that power.

On 12/07/2010 17:42, Yancy Lent wrote:

The problem is many don't know that and think they'll see a steady
stream of SP posts from here on. What would you do if you were me? I'm
thinking of delisting in the interm, sound fair? It is a Lotus blog
after all .

On 7/12/2010 11:16 AM, Rockall Design wrote:

Hi,

It might well be a short-lived trend. I wouldn't move it just yet ;o)

Jake

On 12/07/2010 15:47, Yancy Lent wrote:

Hi Jake,

I'm sentencing a trend .

Would you like me to move you over to Planet SharePoint or could you
give me two feeds? One Lotus, one SharePoint?

Yancy

Here is his blog post....

Title: Goodbye Planet Lotus Readers?

The owner of Planet Lotus, Yancy Lent, asked me yesterday if he should move this site to "Planet Sharepoint" instead. At first I thought it was a joke, but it turns out he has a sister site just like the Lotus one that's only for SharePoint feeds.

Anyway, I said no, don't move it, as the SharePoint posts on here are likely to be short-lived, sporadic and intermingled with Lotus postings. And that, either way, they're of interest to the readers of the Lotus stuff as they're written by a Domino developer.

However, he seems quite insistent and hinted that he'd have to "de-list" me in the interim and asked if I thought was "fair". To which I said, no, I didn't think it was fair. Not unfair on me, but on the users who've grown to rely on his site as their one-stop source of Lotus postings.

If he de-lists me what happens then? Do the visitors I'd lose (7% of my hits) assume I've fallen off the face of the earth? Or do they then have to remember to check here directly or via RSS instead.

It all stinks a bit of control-freakery to me. Expecting to be able compartmentalise a list of blogs in to one bag is bound to be an impossible task. If he didn't have a Planet SharePoint site would his email ever have arrived I wonder?

Yancy said that was I was doing was like:

Coming to a Manchester United forum to talk about Arsenal.

But it's not though is it. Nothing is ever that black and white and his analogy just doesn't work.

What I said to Yancy is:

Do what you like though, I'm not really that bothered. I just think you're doing a dis-service to your visitors.

I also said:

I talk about what I'm doing at the time. Right now it's Sharepoint. Next month it could be something amazing with Domino. Who knows.

What I'm getting round to saying is that if you trust Planet Lotus as the definitive source of Lotus blog posts then maybe you need to be aware that what you're reading is being dictated to you.

I don't know what he's planning on doing, but wanted to make you aware of what he might do. If you're a Planet Lotus visitor and see no posts from me in the coming days or weeks then you know why. Might I suggest you use RSS or Twitter instead.

I put a quick survey here to see if you think what he's suggesting is a good idea. Let the people decide I say.

I read through some of the comments.

• IBM has nothing to do with this site.
• Planet Lotus is censored in the same way Sports Illustrated censors stories on the migratory patterns of the Green Turtle.
• There is a policy for what it takes to get a blog listed, this logically applies to what keeps a blog on the site. If you go off topic why wouldn't I address that?

Thank you for reading.